


There Was Something About Steve Rogers

by doctormccoy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awkwardness, Commission fic, Cuddling, Developing Friendships, Emotional Manipulation, Eventually Earns the Explicit Rating, First Time, Flirting, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mistrust, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Past One Sided Pining, Past Torture, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Romance, Slow Burn, attempts at seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 15:57:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2315198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctormccoy/pseuds/doctormccoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier knows Steve Rogers has deep feelings for Bucky Barnes, and decides that he can use that to his advantage to gain protection from the Hydra agents still trying to find him.</p><p>What he didn't bargain for was actually starting to care about the man they call Captain America, or the strength of Bucky Barnes' memories as they begin to resurface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Don't Know What Love Is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheDisreputableDog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDisreputableDog/gifts).



> Commission fic delivery for enter21, who wanted to see a Winter Soldier that hasn't quite broken free of his conditioning, and uses Steve's feelings for him in order to get his protection from Hydra.
> 
> This was only supposed to be a one shot oops.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Winter Soldier doesn't need anyone to protect him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from[You Don't Know What Love Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOdtQX2jv9Q) by Gene de Paul and Don Raye. ([lyrics](http://cattailmusic.com/Lyrics/YouDontKnow.htm))
> 
> It was hard finding a version of the song with the lyrics, but, [here's what the lyrics would sound layered on top of the music above.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPT6RktCR60)

The Winter Soldier doesn't need anyone to protect him.

He is a highly trained, medically enhanced super assassin, and he is quite capable of taking care of himself.

That is, at least, what he told himself when he left Captain America on the side of the river. 

Hydra doesn't own him anymore, and so he is free to do as he wishes.

Though, it is harder than he thought it might be, having freedom and independence. 

He visited the Smithsonian, seeking answers from a display case and the picture of a stranger who wore his face. 

Is he Bucky Barnes?

When he strains hard enough, or finds himself just on the edge of consciousness, it almost feels as if he could be. Fleeting glimpses of memories that do not belong to him. Of a familiar face, but smaller, and skinnier. 

These strange visions of the past are foreign and distant to the Soldier, but it is hard to ignore the feeling of peace they give him. Steve Rogers wants him to be Bucky Barnes. 

Bucky Barnes died a long time ago. Whether he used to be Barnes or not was irrelevant. He is the Winter Soldier, now.

When the urge to see Steve and make sure he was still alive becomes too much to resist, he finds him and watches him. For the first few months it is somewhat tricky to locate him, even for the Asset. Rogers is keeping a low profile, him and the man with wings that the Soldier remembers fighting in the sky. They are looking for something, and it took a few weeks before he realized it is _him._

They never get close to finding him, of course. The Soldier leaves a lot of false trails for them to follow. A man at a bar who saw a stranger with a metal arm. The elderly motel owner who swears a man with dark hair and a hand that made odd noises had rented a room upstairs, paid in cash. 

It makes it easier to find him when he needs to see him.

He knew him. 

It is oddly comforting, to realize someone cares enough to come looking for you. He doubts Rogers has any interest in him as a weapon. He isn’t searching for the Asset. He is looking for… for Bucky Barnes.

But Bucky Barnes is dead. If Steve has no use for the Soldier, and Barnes is dead, then, why is he still searching?

A few months later the Winter Soldier decides that is something he can use to his advantage.

Steve Rogers isn’t the only one trying to find him, though he is the only one who probably didn't intend to imprison him once he did. Hydra is still searching for their strongest weapon, and the Soldier knows there are more close calls than he would like. Times where he can hear the boots on the stairs, even as he slips out the window or out across the roof. When he has to make a run for it, the screeching of tires not far behind.

He is a capable assassin and he is much stronger and faster than any of the remaining agents Hydra can muster to capture him. But his body demands food, and rest, and it is during these times that he is vulnerable. 

He is hunkered down in the burned out shell of a warehouse on the outskirts of Harlem when they find him. The Soldier pushed himself to the brink of exhaustion before finally deciding to rest a few hours, and that weariness makes him even more vulnerable than usual. He does not hear the Hydra soldiers approaching, or the sound of a taser being charged, until the electrified prongs are buried in the flesh of his neck and several pairs of hands are grabbing for him. 

When he snaps to consciousness, it is to the sight of a black bag being shoved over his head, and the feeling of electricity numbing his body.

He knows he has a very small window of time to escape before the safe word Hydra had implanted in him to shut him down is uttered, and it is with an edge of desperation that he launches into action. If they get him under their control, it's over, and he will become their Asset once more, and that is suddenly the very last thing he wants to happen.

Metal fingers collide with the nearest moving object, and he cqn feel bone crunching beneath them as a pair of hands drop away from him. 

With a snarl and another carefully placed punch, he is unrestrained enough to be able to launch his body sideways and roll free of his captors, ripping the bag from his head so he can assess the situation.

Two Hydra agents down, ten more trying to regain control of the Soldier, who takes one last look at them before launching himself out of the window. 

He tucks and rolls into the impact of the concrete three stories down, ignoring the incredible pain that blossoms in his shoulder as it takes the brunt of the fall, finding his feet and taking off at a sprint.

He can't go back to Hydra, not now that he is starting to remember who he might be. 

It's winter, now, and snow makes him slip and struggle to keep his footing with every step he takes, careful to keep his weight off his most definitely broken shoulder as he leaps over fences. 

He has to get to higher ground, he knows, and it is with some difficulty that he breaks his way into an office building and climbs up the stairs to the roof, throwing himself over to the next rooftop with some difficulty. It is easier going than having to dodge backyard debris and invisible potholes, but as the buildings get taller and farther apart, and the snow on the ground gets heavier, things start to become treacherous.

The Winter Soldier doesn't even realize where his feet were taking him until he finds himself opposite a familiar Tower, staring dazedly up at the large ‘STARK’ emblazoned across the top. 

He has sat on this very roof many times, sometimes four or five days a week, watching one person in particular.

Steve Rogers, who has finally come to New York after months of searching for Bucky Barnes without results. Steve Rogers, who often spends his days in his room, drawing or reading or listening to the radio. 

The very same Steve Rogers who is currently sleeping on the couch in the expansive living room Tony Stark has provided him with, a worn copy of The Silver Chair resting open on his chest. 

Steven Grant Rogers. Captain America.

He knew him.

The Winter Soldier doesn't even think about it.

He can hear the soft whp-whp-whp of a helicopter behind him, closing in. They are coming for him. They are going to wipe him, and use him. 

The Soldier isn’t sure if he is Bucky Barnes, or if he is even the Soldier, anymore. All he knows is that, more than anything, in that moment, he doesn't want to be Hydra’s Asset. Not again.

He backs up as far as he can without leaving the roof, and puts every ounce of strength left in his body into throwing himself at Stark Tower, colliding with the window of Steve’s living room and shattering it, rolling across the glass strewn carpet until he hits the wall opposite with his bad shoulder. 

The noise is more than enough to startle the sleeping man into full alertness, heaving himself to his feet with fists up for a fight. The Soldier watchs him take in the shattered glass strewn across his carpet, and the huddled, shivering shape against his far wall.

If he had ever expected to see the Winter Soldier lying on his carpet, covered in bloody cuts, he hides it well behind an expression of almost comical shock, mouth open and eyes bulging. 

“Bucky?”

The concern and desperate hope in that voice is very real, and the Soldier knows he’d made the right choice in coming here. Steve Rogers can be manipulated into protecting him from Hydra. He can trick him into keeping this illusion of Bucky Barnes safe. 

He manages a vague imitation of Bucky’s smirk and winks at Steve, the world going grey around the edges.

“The one and only, Stevie.”

Just before darkness closes around him, Steve’s face fills his vision, and he looks so painfully, desperately hopeful that the last thing the Soldier remembers feeling before he’s unconscious is…

Guilt.

When the Soldier wakes up, Steve is still there, in his line of sight. He’s talking to someone that he can’t see, and with some small effort he tries to shift himself into a sitting position, drawing the attention of the blond haired man beside him. 

“Bucky, you’re awake.”

Guilt again, crawling like spiders through his insides.

He swallows it down and manages a faint smile, doing his best not to flinch away from the foreign touch when Steve moves to help him sit up.

“How long was I out?”

The Soldier gingerly presses metal fingers to his heavily bandaged right shoulder, relieved that the swelling is minimal and the pain far more manageable than it had been before. His superior healing abilities are at work, mending the broken bone much faster than a normal human being’s. In a few more days he won't even remember that it had been broken at all.

“Almost a week. We were starting to wonder if you were going to sleep forever,” Steve says from somewhere beside him, drawing his attention back away from his sore shoulder.

The words are out of his mouth before he has much of a chance to think about them, and afterwards the Soldier is left to wonder where on earth they came from in the first place.

“You didn’t kiss me awake, did you?”

He isn't sure if it is the words themselves, or the wink that accompanies them, that makes Rogers’ face light up like that, but, the Soldier finds himself almost amused by the embarrassed, pink glow he now wears. Imagine Captain America blushing like a teenager at a cheesy bit of flirting. 

“Bucky-“

Whatever he is about to say is cut off by the loud entrance of another man, with short dark brown hair and a carefully sculpted beard and mustache. The Soldier remembers his name from one of the many files Hydra had made him memorize.

Anthony Stark. Alias: Iron Man. Genius level intelligence, but, minor combat ability without the Iron Man suit. Hydra Threat Assessment: Level 7. 

“So, Sleeping Beauty finally decided to grace us with his presence.”

Anthony Stark. Alias: Iron Man. Of questionable intelligence, and minor combat ability without the Iron Man suit. Updated Threat Assessment: Level 5.

Tony seems unfazed by the unimpressed look he gets from the prone man, instead choosing to approach him and reaching out to tap the metal plating of his prosthetic arm.

“You gonna tell us why you’re here? Because you have sixty seconds to explain why you defaced my brand new Tower at two in the morning when there is a perfectly good _door_.”

The Soldier racks his brain for something that Bucky Barnes would say, struggling to control the Hydra implanted impulse to just eliminate the threat before him.

“The Hydra agents behind me weren’t giving me much of a choice,” he settles on finally, head cocking to the side and eyes focusing on Stark’s.

“Besides, it isn’t as if you don’t have a habit of making up your own front door on a building.” 

He looks down and away from Tony, and his gaze settles on Steve, who’s wearing an expression of mingled amusement and uncertainty. Tony must have said something to make him doubt the Soldier’s motives. Perhaps, then, it is time for a bit of the truth.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” he tries again, and the way Steve’s face pinches between his eyebrows lets him know he’s hit a mark.

The Winter Soldier knows the Avengers inside and out. He knows their weaknesses, their mannerisms, their habits, their eccentric way of entering buildings. He knows the places they visited regularly, and which people he will take if he ever needs to force any of their hands. Hydra has made sure their strongest weapon will be useful against their most capable enemies.

Except for Steve Rogers. 

He knows very little about the man dressed in blue beside him, who is looking at him like he is prepared to go to war with Hydra that instant if it means keeping Bucky safe. Though, now he realizes the reason for that is because Hydra feared he would renege on his training if he knew too much about the man that he had once fought and died for. 

_With good reason, too,_ he thinks to himself, letting his mind drift as Steve and Tony start to argue about whether he should be allowed to stay in Stark Tower. 

Hadn’t he, after all, only been capable of breaking years of conditioning and psychological abuse after recognizing the man with the silver star on his chest? 

There was something about Steve Rogers that Hydra couldn’t cleanse from the mind of Bucky Barnes. Something that has stuck, rooted deep within his mind. Something that will remain with him, no matter how many times he is wiped.

“I can’t leave the Tower. This is the only place where Hydra won’t dare to storm, not when their forces are already so limited. They’re a long way off from having the strength and numbers to take on the numerous high threat individuals that reside here,” the Soldier says abruptly, cutting off whatever argument Tony is about to make. 

He looks up at the Iron Man with a quiet expression, and that feeling of boiling guilt is back when he finally gets a nod, reluctant as it may seem.

“You came here because you think it is somewhere where you will be safe from Hydra.”

Steve’s voice breaks in once more, drawing the attention of the Soldier. He swallows, and shrugs, reaching up to rub awkwardly at his injured shoulder.

“I recently came to realize that it is… a lot harder to go it alone than previously assumed. And that this is the safest place for me to be. Both for my own personal protection, and… everyone else’s.”

He is a threat to the safety of anyone near him if he were to leave Stark Tower. Hydra had no problem eliminating anyone that got in the way of them recapturing their prized weapon. Once upon a time, the Soldier was one of those men who took no issue with killing any innocent that stood between him and his mission.

But things change.

The man himself changes.

Maybe he doesn't want to be a weapon any longer. Or at least, not if Hydra was the one pulling the trigger.

He decides that, perhaps, it won't be so terrible to be Bucky Barnes. Even if it is only for show.

“I don’t want any more people to get hurt because of me.”

Except for Hydra, perhaps, but, no one can really begrudge him his desire for that particular brand of revenge.

This seems to be what finally gets Tony to agree, and the Soldier breathes an inner sigh of relief. Tony Stark has a save-the-world complex a mile wide, and it is easy for him to take advantage of that.

At least, that’s what the Asset tells himself. It has nothing to do with an actual desire to see no more people end up in harm’s way because of him. 

Nothing at all.

Steve sighs and waves his hand for Tony to leave, and his absence results in an awkward silence between him and the man opposite him. It takes a couple minutes for either of them to find something with which to break it, and it’s the Soldier, surprisingly, that speaks up first.

“Who were you talking with before Stark came in?” he asks suddenly, remembering that the other man had been conversing with an empty room when he woke up.

A quizzical expression forms before comprehension dawns on Steve’s face, and he flashes a grin that says he’s excited to tell the Winter Soldier something.

“Jarvis?”

A brief moment of silence, where the Soldier is left wondering if maybe all those months of chasing after a ghost have left Rogers a little imbalanced, before he’s shut up by a smooth, almost bored sounding voice emanating from the walls and ceiling.

“Yes, sir?”

The Soldier goes still and looks around him warily, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice. Steve’s grin only gets wider. 

“Jarvis, can you play something from my tracklist?”

Another brief moment before soft jazz fills the room, a mix of piano and saxophone with the gentle tp-tp of a beat from a drum. Bucky recognizes the song. He remembers dancing to it in a tiny, dirty little apartment in Brooklyn wearing only his socks and pajamas, and a skinny boy named Steve trying to follow his steps on clumsy feet, one clammy hand clutched in Bucky’s and another hugged tight to his waist. 

“You still listen to this song?” he asks in a quiet murmur, distracted from his confusion about the source of the music by the gentle croon of the saxophone. You Don’t Know What Love Is, 1941, written by Gene de Paul and Don Raye. Bucky had picked up the record for ten cents on his way home from the docks one day on a whim.

Steve smiles faintly and reaches out to place his hand on Bucky’s metal one, head cocking to the side.

“Of course I do, Buck. You told me you were going to teach me how to dance that night if it killed you. Didn’t want me embarrassing you in front of the girls, anymore,” he chuckles, and the warm glow of nostalgia is almost painful in the cage of Bucky’s ribs. He remembers that. He remembers using any excuse in the book to get Steve to dance with him. They couldn’t go dancing in public, after all. But, in the privacy of their own home…

A soft female voice starts to purr words that Bucky is all too familiar with, and the ache grows until it consumes his entire body. 

_“You don't know what love is until you've learned the meaning of the Blues.. Until you've loved a love you had to lose… You don't know what love is.”_

Bucky’s lips move of their own accord, silently forming around the words that he knows better than his own name.

“You don't know how lips burn until you've kissed and had to pay the cost, until you've flipped your heart and you have lost… You don't know what love is.”

He remembers hoping that Steve would hear the lyrics, would really _hear_ them. Remembers the feeling of his heart thudding painfully against his ribs and wondering if it was loud enough for Steve to hear. 

Remembers the ache in other places when Steve tentatively rested his cheek against Bucky’s chest as they sway, and the desire to hold him even closer. To wrap him up in his arms and shield him from the rest of the world.

He looks down to see Steve’s hand, no longer skinny and frail but broad and strong, resting over the metal abomination of his own hand, and something dark seizes inside him. 

The Soldier has no place trying to become part of this memory. It is not his memory. It's Bucky Barnes’ memory. 

But there was something about Steve Rogers that made the Soldier desperately wish it was his.

If the Steve of 1941 had known his best friend would become such a monster, would he have danced with him so easily that night?

The Soldier doubts it. 

Steve would hate him if he knew what he would become. He would spurn him, and turn him away. This Steve will too, in time. He will grow tired of the Soldier, of the monster he has allowed into his home. He will send him away from his sight soon enough.

He ignores the rest of the song as it croons over the intercom, too focused on getting himself out of that bed and across the room. 

The final notes of the song play out as the door slams shut behind the Winter Soldier, leaving Steve to sit there with a crushed expression on his face. 

“I am sorry, sir. I thought the song seemed appropriate,” Jarvis says in a quiet voice, earning a small smile from Steve.

“It’s not your fault. I appreciate the effort, Jarvis, thank you. I think it was just a little too much too soon,” he sighes, sinking back in the chair to stare up at the ceiling, as if it holds all the answers to his questions.

Bucky is in there somewhere. Steve just has to find him.


	2. If You'll Believe In Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has been with Steve for a month and the Soldier is finally starting to realize what it really means to have freedom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This'll be the last chapter update for today. The rest will be sporadically posted through the rest of the week.
> 
> The time period of the story will jump around between chapters, so make sure to check the notes at the top to see where the chapter falls in the timeline.
> 
> Note that the back and forth between using 'Soldier' and 'Bucky' as identifiers is intentional. It's meant to show the constant flip flop between his perception of himself as the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes.
> 
> Title from ["Holland Road"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EALWGx4cnUw) by Mumford and Sons.

It has been a month since the slip up in the infirmary, and the Soldier is pleased to say there have been no further incidents. 

Things have settled into a routine between him and Rogers, and the rest of the people that live in Stark Tower. 

He lives in Steve’s apartment with him, after being resoundingly denied his own, private quarters. It seems that none of them trust him as far as they can throw him. 

Which is actually pretty far, all things considered. 

“What’s your angle, buddy?” Sam Wilson, Steve’s flying friend, asked him for the hundredth time since he’d come back to the Tower to discover the Winter Soldier asleep on Steve’s couch. 

He's eyeballing him from across the table, where the Soldier is carefully eating the bowl of cereal that Steve had given him that morning after bringing him back from therapy, his eyebrows knitted and mouth dug into a deep frown. 

“If you keep making that grouchy face it’ll freeze like that, you know,” the Solder quips, not even looking up from the sugary rainbow of food in front of him. He doesn't remember the food Hydra gave him ever coming in so many colors or flavors. It was generally just a lot of IV fluids and pastes in a tube to give his body the calories it needed to complete a mission. In the months he’d been on his own, he’d survived off tasteless things ferreted from garbage cans. Eating had been about giving his body what it required, not about… enjoyment.

That first morning, after the Asset had let himself be coaxed down from his hiding place on the roof of Stark Tower when he’d been too confused and upset to face anyone, Steve had put the bowl in front of him like it was perfectly normal to feed an assassin such a rainbow abomination. The look of incredulous disbelief on his face had made Steve laugh, and the Soldier found that he rather enjoyed the sound of it. 

“I know it looks weird, but you’ll like it, I promise.”

And, well. Steve had never given him any reason to distrust his word. 

A month later and now Steve made sure the cupboards always had at least two boxes of Froot Loops in them at all time, as it has quickly become the Soldier’s go-to comfort food, especially when he's stressed.

This morning had involved a particularly rigorous session with the Shield psychotherapist that Steve had found for him – a woman with silver hair and a kind face, who is trying to help the Soldier cope with what he had suffered at the hands of Hydra.

He doesn't like her. She's too smart, and very good at getting him to admit things he doesn't want to talk about. 

Sometimes it helps, but, most of the time it just leaves him feeling irritable and on the hairy edge of an emotional misfire the rest of the day, three days a week. 

The first week had been the worst of all; a series of doctors and exams to determine his health after being frozen and thawed and wiped so many times by Hydra, and an entire afternoon of Tony Stark’s one sided chatter about his metal arm and how he could have made something better with his eyes closed on the moon with nothing but rocks and dust to work with. 

There had been a lot of Froot Loops in that first week. 

A lot of instances where Steve would come back to the apartment and find him curled up in the dark, safe space of his closet, face pressed into the neatly hung clothing that still smelled of him.

And plenty of sleepless nights seated by the window, watching and waiting for Hydra with restless eyes that never settle on one place for long. 

It doesn't help that literally no one trusts him to be alone for long except Steve. He's always accompanied by someone wherever he goes, and he isn’t even allowed to eat breakfast by himself until Steve returns from picking up some groceries in the city. 

Sam Wilson has more reason to distrust him than most, the Soldier understands. He had ripped his wings off and thrown him off a floating ship several thousand feet up in the air with full intent to kill him, after all.

He supposes he should apologize to him for that at some point. They haven’t covered apologies, yet, in his therapy.

The flying man shoots him an annoyed expression and purses his lips, clearly trying to come up with something to break the silence as the Soldier pours another bowl of cereal and begins to eat. 

The sugary cereal makes the milk at the bottom taste sweet and foreign, which is good. He can't stand the sight or the taste of regular milk anymore. Steve would often only buy the flavored kind, strawberry, or chocolate, or even coffee, and pours them from their cartons into plain glass bottles, instead. The Soldier never sees the cartons themselves, anymore. Steve had nearly ended up permanently wallowing in his guilt the first time the Soldier had caught sight of the simple cardboard carton in the fridge and stopped breathing, eyes bulging from his skull and fingers opening and closing around thin air. 

Steve has never demanded he explain why he had been so terrified of the unassuming box, and the Soldier has never offered. Steve simply removed the carton from the building and never brought it, or anything similar, back into the apartment ever since. 

This sort of silent, automatic acceptance and understanding of Bucky’s needs is starting to mess with the Soldier’s head. It isn’t fair that Steve is just so… easy going about things that would send most people off the deep end trying to comprehend.

Whatever retort Sam is trying to formulate is interrupted by Steve entering the apartment, grocery bags in hand, and a feeling of relief and contentment washes over the Soldier. The edgy anxiety from his therapy appointment seems distant, now, and he stands up to greet the other man by pressing his face into the crook of his neck, arms sliding around the slim point of his waist. 

At some point this had become his normal way of welcoming Steve back to the apartment.

Bucky isn’t sure why or when, exactly, it had started happening.

He isn’t about to stop, though, when it means he can feel the rumble of amusement in the other man’s chest at Bucky’s affectionate greeting, and the gentle carding of his fingers through Bucky’s hair.

“You need a haircut at some point. It’s starting to get long enough to put it in a ponytail,” Steve says, his voice warm with fondness. Bucky doesn't respond, too intent on nosing at the hollow of Steve’s throat. 

Steve smells of leather and soap and Brooklyn. 

Bucky likes it even more than he likes Froot Loops.

A polite cough from behind him brings the Soldier back to the present, and he looks behind him to see Sam watching their interaction with a raised eyebrow, the question in his eyes aimed more at Steve than the man wrapped around him.

“Thank you, Sam. I’ll talk to you in a bit,” Steve sighs, putting a hand on the Soldier’s shoulder to gently put space between them. It's his flesh shoulder, the one that had forced him into Steve’s living room. It's fully healed, now, though there's the occasional phantom ache when the January cold outside is too much. 

The Soldier only returns to his seat at the table when Sam has left the apartment, feeling much more at ease now that it’s just him and Steve. Being with Steve is easy. Steve doesn't watch his every move with untrusting eyes the Soldier knows he deserves, considering his motives for staying here. But it's safe, being with Steve.

“How was therapy?” he asks the Soldier, not really expecting an answer as he put things away in the fridge and the cupboards, his coat and gloves draped over the back of a chair. The milk is already in its glass containers, so he assumes Steve must have stopped by Natasha’s room to check in with her before coming here. 

The Soldier likes Natasha, despite himself. Out of all of them, she's the one most likely to figure out his deception of Steve Rogers, but, she's also the first one to ever land a solid shot on him when he's in battle mode. An inch higher and he’d have been a dead body on the overpass, and not here in Steve’s kitchen eating rainbow cereal out of a bowl. It's hard not to respect that she had also tricked him into believing she was behind a vehicle before sneaking up on him and disarming him.

No one disarms the Winter Soldier. No one who lives to talk about it, anyways. 

It doesn't help that she seems to be the one warming up to him the fastest, either. Her and the sharp shooter she's always with, Clint Barton. The Soldier doesn't know much about him. He’d never been deemed much of a threat by Hydra, being that he's only human and exhibits little advanced combat skill without his bow. 

He’d been shocked when Bucky had finger spelled out ‘Hello’ to him without looking up from his book on American history through the 1970s by way of greeting the first time he and Natasha come to babysit him. 

Which had led to a very uncomfortable discussion with Steve on just how much Hydra knew about the members of the Avengers. Clint’s deafness isn’t something many people are aware of, especially once Tony had replaced his Shield issued hearing devices with far more advanced Stark Tech versions that sends the sound waves directly into his brain and are invisible to the naked eye.

The Soldier finds he rather likes Barton, as well, despite the fact the man will definitely never be capable of disarming him. He is incredibly easy going, and blunt, like Tony. He doesn't sugar coat it that the reason he and Natasha are there is because no one trusts him, yet, to not kill them all in their sleep.

And he doesn't run away when the Soldier smiles vaguely and explaines that he doesn't really trust himself not to kill them all in their sleep, either. 

Clint brings his own Froot Loops to breakfast because he knows better than to try and get Bucky to share with him. 

Clint also likes to bring over movies from his extensive collection for them to watch together, so neither of them have to try and force any awkward conversation. They are always good movies, too. Movies Bucky has never heard of, but ultimately ends up enjoying.

He let Bucky keep his extended edition box set of the Lord of the Rings, and his blu-ray of Brave.

He sometimes stays with them for dinner, even when Steve is home and he doesn't have to stick around. Natasha joins them occasionally, too, and Bucky found he rather likes the sight of a full table of people. 

He likes that Clint will joke with him behind Steve’s back about how he's a mother hen, much to the blond haired man’s frustration and continued insistence that he really did not know any sign language, yet, and that it is definitely very rude of them to have a conversation he can't take part in, especially when Natasha is there to agree with them that Steve definitely has some mothering qualities.

Clint had been taken and used by someone, too. He knows what it feels like to have your brain taken out and played with like someone’s idea of a toy. To feel like a monster had been shoved in its place.

He understands the deeply buried guilt in Bucky’s heart over the people that have died by his hand. 

It's easy to talk to Clint. Clint never makes him feel like what Hydra did to him is his fault. 

“Bucky?”

The Soldier realizes he has been staring blankly at his cereal bowl for several long minutes, looking up at Steve with a dazed sort of expression on his face.

“It.. it was okay. We talked about the wiping.”

He looks away so he doesn't have to see the sadness in Steve’s face at hearing that. He knows Steve wishes he could go back in time and save him from all of this, from what Hydra had done to him. He sees it in his eyes every time he wakes Bucky from another nightmare, and after each panic attack and episode of anxiety. 

His brain is traumatized from the wiping, and the constant freezing and thawing Hydra put him through. It's healing now that it isn’t being constantly electrocuted and frozen, but with that healing came newly remembered memories of the things he had done. The things that had been done to him. 

It's easier to be Bucky Barnes some days more than others.

Other days he is the Winter Soldier, through and through. 

He spends those days in Steve’s bed, blankets tugged up over his head so that he was surrounded by the smell and warmth of the other man. 

Steve never asks him to explain why he does this, or demands that he quit it. Some days he will even, carefully, as if afraid of spooking a cornered animal, curl around the quivering lump of Bucky in his bed, and pet his hair through the blankets until the shaking stops, no matter how many hours it takes for Bucky to come down. 

Steve is so infuriatingly understanding it makes Bucky want to punch him sometimes.

“Sam was nice today,” he says by way of making conversation, idly running his spoon through the pink milk at the bottom of his empty bowl. He jerks when a pile of rainbow loops clatter on top of it, looking up to see Steve pouring them for him. 

“He’s getting there, Buck. Just give it some time,” he replies in that stupid, comforting voice of his, letting his fingers pet through Bucky’s hair again. Bucky likes when he touches his hair. 

Steve only moves away when the urgency of his bladder forces him to the bathroom.

Bucky eats every single bite in his bowl even though it leaves him feeling sick and overstuffed.

The Winter Soldier doesn’t understand why he does this. It goes against all logic to eat more than his body requires to function. 

But it makes Steve happy to see Bucky eating.

So he eats everything he's given, and when he's done he follows Steve to the living room and lays down on the couch with his head on his lap, closing his eyes at the feeling of those gentle hands in his hair once more. 

It isn’t wrong of him to want a little happiness, right? To do more than just take advantage of Steve’s selfless kindness for his own protection? Steve hasn’t turned him away, yet, or spurned his touches, and it'd take a stronger man than Bucky not to accept what harmless affection he can glean after years of abuse and violence. 

Bucky ignores the discomforting fullness of his stomach and curls his arms around Steve’s thigh, instead, breathing in the smell of New York City that still clung to his jeans from his trip to the store. He's asleep before he has a chance to process what is happening, and he misses the press of lips against his hairline and the vague curve of a smile that form on them when he shifts in his sleep. 

It isn’t so terrible to accept what warmth and gentleness he can get. It surely won't distract the Soldier from his mission. 

There was something about Steve Rogers that made it difficult for the Soldier to remember he isn’t really Bucky Barnes. 

There was something about Steve Rogers that made him desperately want to believe he is Bucky Barnes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hawkeye is canonically deaf so I decided to keep that in. I love the idea of him and Bucky secretly judging everyone around them through sign language.


	3. Sometimes I Hear You Calling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Winter Soldier still refuses to call it home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for a fairly detailed description of Bucky experiencing a panic attack.
> 
> Chapter title from ["Hymn For The Missing"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsyPe21jOro) by Red.
> 
> As always, I can be found on tumblr [here!](http://buckybarnnes.tumblr.com)

The inhabitants of Stark Tower have learned over time how to tell if the day is going to be a good one, or a bad one.

Today starts off with all the earmarkings of a truly terrible one.

The Soldier nearly explodes through the door in his desperation to get away from his therapist’s face on the screen, ignoring the gentle voice trying to coax him back inside. The violence of his sudden reappearance put Sam, who got stuck with Bucky Babysitting Duty this morning, and who had been sitting in the other room perusing a magazine, immediately on alert. He jerks to his feet with his hands up, open but ready to curl into fists if he needs to defend himself.

“Barnes? You alright?” he asks warily, eyeballing the wrecked looking man in front of him, who is staring dazedly down at the dismembered doorknob in his metal hand, as if he doesn't know how it got there. Sam’s voice jerks him back to reality, and he looks up sharply, the doorknob falling to the marble floor with a loud clattering.

“I’m fine.”

The Soldier always says that. There's no reason to tell this man the truth. There's no reason for any of them to know the truth.

That he is broken beyond repair. A gun without a target. An assassin without a mission.

Like a knife missing its protective handle, that can only cause harm to any who touched it. 

The monster under the bed, waiting to strike the instant you let your guard down. 

He breezes by Wilson without a second glance, ignoring the defeated expression his therapist is wearing on the projection behind him. 

She's trying to help him when she asks how being with Steve makes him feel. 

“He makes me feel like I’m home,” he answers without thinking, going still the instant the words pass his lips.

The Soldier didn’t have a home. Weapons do not get a _home._ They are stored somewhere, like a dirty secret you don't want to look at in times of peace, because they are no longer needed. A loaded gun is useless when there is no war to be fought. 

Nausea and disdain had risen up in his throat and he’d stood up, suddenly, his body rigid and mind on edge. 

“Stark Tower is your home, now, James. You’re safe there, with Steve and Natasha and the rest of your friends. They will keep you safe from Hydra.”

_And from yourself._

She doesn’t say that part out loud, but the Soldier can hear the words hang heavily in the air between them. 

He didn’t need to hear them spoken to know that he is the greatest threat to himself, right now. 

To them all.

The Soldier’s steps are heavy and fast as he storms down the hallway, putting as much space between him and Steve’s fragile friend in the room he’d just left.

Sam Wilson doesn't have his pack, or any weapons that the Soldier can discern. He can snap his neck before anyone has the chance to stop him. 

He's just as human as the rest of them, without his weapons. Stark and Barton are sheep, ripe for the slaughter, and even Natasha and the Extremis enhanced Pepper Potts have to sleep some time. Banner is the only one that will stand a chance against the Soldier, with the nearly indestructible Hulk simmering beneath the surface of his skin, and Thor the Demi God.

And Steve..

With a wretched sound, the Soldier shoves open the door to Steve’s apartment, slamming it shut behind him. Natasha is already there, with Clint, sitting at the table eating breakfast, looking up with interest to see him returning from his therapy appointment so soon. Not that he hasn’t stormed out well before the end of his sessions before, but, he’s been doing _so well_ lately.

With a question in her eyes, Natasha picks up the box of Froot Loops and holds it up, silent – assessing.

All the Soldier sees is the ring of bruising and bleeding abrasions he would leave on her pale throat after he strangles her with his bare hands. 

He takes the box from her without making eye contact and follows a straight path to Steve’s bedroom, throwing the door shut behind him with a satisfying crack and sliding into the cool safety of the dark closet. 

It's big, for a closet. Bigger than the room that the Soldier vaguely remembers spending much of his early childhood in, at the Orphanage. It's dark and, despite the size, crammed with clothing and shoes. It's filled with both his and Steve’s things, and Bucky likes the cramped, muffled solitude it offers him. 

He crawls to the back corner and sits up against the familiar wall, his face burying into the neatly hung clothing. 

It smells like Steve in here. The scent of his aftershave clings to the fabric, and Bucky allows the aroma to overwhelm his senses, drinking it in with huge, gulping breaths.

Only when the buzzing, serrated edge of the impending anxiety attack melts away does he finally let his head thunk back against the wall, eyes closed despite the darkness. 

He blindly opens the slightly crushed box he’s been clutching to his chest this entire time and carefully pops the cereal into his mouth, once piece at a time. 

He focuses on trying to identify which pieces are what color based on the flavor and by the time he’s eaten half the box he feels steadier. More human. 

He decides he still likes the yellow rings the best and the purple rings the least. 

The Soldier can hear the faint roar of a bear from the other room, and he quietly, cautiously, creeps his way out of the closet, cereal box still tucked under his arm. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in there, but, the sun still seems to climbing its way into the sky, and Steve still hasn’t returned, meaning it can't have been more than an hour or two at most. 

He opens the bedroom door and peeks out, spying Clint and Natasha sitting on the couch in the living room. _Brave_ is playing on the screen opposite but the Soldier can tell that neither of them is really watching the film even though their eyes are glued to the screen.

They’re giving him the opportunity to retreat back into the room by pretending not to notice him and there’s an unfamiliar warmth in the pit of his belly when he realizes that they’re letting him make the choice whether he wishes to join them or not. 

There’s a bowl and a bottle of strawberry milk on the coffee table, unused and waiting for him, should he choose to take that step towards them. 

He hesitates. He’s sure Natasha, at least, has heard the rustling of the cereal when his grip tightens around the box in his arm, but she doesn’t so much as twitch in his direction.

She merely leans against the couch and drapes her arm across the back of it, fingertips barely brushing Clint’s shoulder.

There’s a fair amount of space between them.

Enough for an entire person, even.

He clears his throat and takes a tentative step forward.

Natasha sees that as an attempt at communication and turns her head to look over the couch at Bucky, standing by the door and looking uncertain, his eyes creased with exhaustion and face pale. 

She smiles and invites him with the faintest jerk of her head in the direction of the television. 

Bucky takes another clumsy step, tugged forward by her beckoning. 

He sits on the couch between them and lets Natasha take the cereal box from his grasp, watching her pour the brightly colored loops into the bowl on the table before she adds the milk. 

Clint’s arm joins Natasha’s, curving over the back of the couch behind Bucky, and Bucky tries not to acknowledge the strange way it comforts him to feel the heat of their skin against his neck when he settles down to eat his cereal.

On the screen, Merida is firing an arrow clean through the middle of another arrow. 

Bucky smiles around a mouthful of Froot Loops and strawberry milk.

He lets Clint steal a piece from the bowl when the other man thinks he isn’t looking.

It's a purple one, anyways. 

He falls asleep halfway through _The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey_ , and that’s how Steve finds him when he comes home that afternoon from a meeting with Phil Coulson about Hydra’s attempted resurgence efforts.

Bucky wakes up the moment Steve’s feet hit the carpet of the den area, and he opens his eyes to see the fond expression the other man is wearing. He’s fallen asleep with his upper body sprawled across Natasha’s lap, and one leg is curled up under him while the other is hooked over Clint’s knee, dangling in midair off the edge of the couch. He can feel the red head’s fingers still stroking through his hair, and Clint’s hand is warm and steadying on his thigh, keeping his leg from sliding while he slept. 

He’s too tired to feel properly embarrassed at the position and closes his eyes again, letting Natasha gently shift out from under him so she could go talk to Steve about what had happened that morning. 

Bucky misses Clint also getting up off the couch, his legs carefully moved to stretch out along the cushions.

He doesn’t miss Steve squatting next to the couch and petting his hand over Bucky’s hair, a warm look on his face and eyes soft with affection. 

It doesn’t feel right, seeing Steve looking at him in that way. If he’d known that only a few hours ago, the Soldier had been contemplating the ease with which he could murder everyone in this Tower, he wouldn’t be looking at him with such fondness.

“Sam and Nat said you kinda had a rough morning,” Steve murmurs, and the Soldier lets himself be coaxed into sitting upright, his mouth tasting of sleep and fake fruit. 

He shrugs and looks away, resisting the urge to take his cereal box back to the closet for the rest of his life. 

“Therapy,” he croaks, by way of explanation. He never really has to clarify beyond that. Steve knows that his appointments with his therapist are hard, especially when they force him to recount the things he’d done as the Winter Soldier. 

Steve nods and reaches out to rest his hand on Bucky’s knee, squeezing it gently before he stands up.

“I got lunch from that Chinese restaurant you like,” he says quietly, when it’s clear that Bucky doesn’t intend to elaborate any further. Bucky wants to scream and punch something. Steve never tries to push him. He never forces him to do or say anything he doesn't want. It's different from everything he’s ever known, and he doesn't understand how he's supposed to take it.

His entire existence in Hydra’s clutches had been one order after another. Everything he did was by force. He’d never been given a choice, and he’d certainly never been allowed to speak on his own time.

He remembers the sting of Alexander Pierce’s palm against his cheek when he’d ignored the order to report in. When he’d stammered like a broken record, because in that moment all he knew is that the man on the bridge is important. 

The _most_ important. 

When he didn’t do as he was told, he was wiped. 

Steve has yet to wipe him for his disobedience.

At least, as far as he remembered. 

The prickle of doubt starts to fester the moment the thought crosses his mind, and he’s instantly leaning away from Steve, anxiety already starting to ramp up at the very idea that Steve is wiping him, and that the comfortable complacency the Soldier always feels comes from not remembering the bad things Steve does to him.

Steve senses the change in the air between them and carefully squats back down again so that Bucky is the one with the higher ground, his hands flat against his own knees and attempting to be as unthreatening as possible. 

“Bucky?” 

The Soldier startles, chest aching, his expression lost behind a tangled curtain of dark hair. He can hear the Hydra doctors beside him, and feel probing instruments against the metal of his arm. There's the whir of a machine starting up and electricity crackling in the air and they're going to wipe him, he's going to forget again-

The panic attack that he had managed to stave off earlier hits him with full force, and the Soldier nearly chokes on his next breath when his instincts slam into overdrive. Steve is smart enough to recognize the signs and has flung himself out of the way just as a metal arm swings a kill strike through the air where he’d been kneeling seconds before. 

The Soldier feels like his skin is on fire and that must be the electricity coursing through him. They are wiping him. He's going to forget. 

He collapses forward onto the carpet and manages to catch his head on the corner of the coffee table on his way down, curling into a ball as he shivers. 

He cannot see and he cannot fight or move or breathe. Each breath feels like it's filling his lungs with water and all he can think is that he’s going to die. That this time is the last and that Hydra will win because soon he will be nothing more than the Soldier, the Asset, the _Weapon_.

Distantly, he can hear Steve’s voice, and whatever small part of Bucky that is still capable of directing his own mind struggles to crawl its way out of the darkness and towards the safety that sound offers. The words start to take form and he clutches at them like a lifeline – like they are the only thing left that he can hold on to.

“You’re safe here, Bucky, it’s okay. I know what you’re feeling right now is scary, but, there is nothing and no one here that is going to hurt you,” Steve is saying, and Bucky’s fingers flex against the carpet, as if physically trying to reach out and take hold of the safety offered by those words. 

“I want you to focus on what I’m saying, and on your breathing. I want you to take a deep breath every time I finish a sentence.”

Bucky feels his aching lungs expanding in his chest, letting the air escape him in a slow, shaky breath. 

“Good, Bucky... I’m so proud of you, you’re doing an excellent job.”

Another deep, rattling breath, and Bucky feels the tension starting to bleed out of his muscles, his face still pressing into the expensive carpeting. He can smell it, now. A plain, cottony scent, like a new t-shirt that hasn’t been washed, yet. 

“Just focus on your next breath, and take as long as you need, Bucky.. You’re doing so good..”

There’s a gentle hand in his hair, now, and Bucky’s too limp and exhausted to swat it away, even if he wants to at this point. The touch is soothing and repetitive. His breathing evens out as he unconsciously times it to match the careful stroking of Steve’s fingers, his eyes still squeezed shut. He’s shivering as his sweat drenched clothing sticks to his skin, the cool air in the living room doing little to bank the fire that had been coursing through him just a moment ago. 

Steve’s voice only goes quiet when Bucky’s eyes finally open, strong hands helping him sit up. The contact grounds Bucky in the present and he knows he probably resembles a ghost when he turns to look at Steve.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Steve is gentle as he pulls him in close, carefully pulling him up onto his feet so he can lead him to the bathroom. Bucky’s head is throbbing viciously, and it’s only when he catches a glimpse of his reflection that he realizes why.

There’s a gash on his temple about an inch long that’s left a pretty impressive mess of blood on his face and in his hair. Probably from when he hit himself on the coffee table on his way to the floor.

The rest of his face is pale as a sheet, the hollows of his eyes darkly shadowed and skin shiny with sweat. He looks like he’s literally been chewed up and spat out by the Hulk. 

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Bucky. You spent the last several decades as a Hydra prisoner, and survived some of the worst things I could never imagine. It’s understandable that you’re going to need time to recover,” Steve says patiently, helping him remove his sweaty clothing and sitting him down on the toilet in only his boxers, rummaging through the cabinet over the sink for something. 

Bucky stares vaguely at the bathroom wall opposite him, knowing that Steve won't press him to talk about what had triggered the panic attack unless Bucky wanted to talk about it.

Bucky knows that this time, he really _needs_ to talk about it.

“I started to wonder if you were wiping me. That the reason I only remembered everyone being kind to me was because you were wiping me every time I was punished for being disobedient.”

He hears Steve go still at this for a moment, before the rummaging continues, gauze pads, rubbing alcohol, and bandages starting to pile up on the sink beside him. 

“And… And I thought about how I wouldn’t even know if you were wiping me, because I would just confuse the memories of it with Hydra wiping me.”

Steve is suddenly kneeling in Bucky’s line of sight and he blinks, unable to stop himself from flinching away when Steve raises his hand towards the blood crusted gash on his forehead. Steve notices and very carefully lowers his hand, waiting for Bucky to give a small nod of permission before trying again.

“Bucky.. I promise you we would never, ever do that. Wiping you, or hurting you, is the last thing any of us want to do. Everything you remember is everything that has truly happened, here, at Stark Tower. None of it has been faked. Nothing has been taken away. Your mind, and your memories, belong to you, and no one here would ever want to steal anything from you, or punish you,” Steve says, his touch slow and deliberate as he cleans away the blood from Bucky’s skin. 

The sight of the ugly red fluid makes Bucky want to throw up.

He remembers this morning, and the image of Natasha’s crumpled dead body that had flashed in his mind before he’d sequestered himself to the bedroom.

“I wanted to hurt everyone this morning,” he chokes, so quietly that he hopes that maybe Steve doesn't hear him.

But Steve does hear him, and while his nostrils flare faintly, making Bucky aware of the man’s inner distress, Steve himself doesn't actively do anything to show that he is upset with the new information.

“But you didn’t,” he responds, finally, dabbing at the cut with a cotton ball soaked in the alcohol. The smell is harsh and chemically, and Bucky pushes it away from his face, hand coming up to cover his nose against the acrid tang of it. It reminds him of probing hands and the hum of instruments, and Steve seems to understand what happened the instant he’s pushed back.

He tosses the swab in the toilet and flushes it away, putting the bottle of alcohol somewhere deep in the darkness of the cabinet. 

“I’m sorry, Buck. I didn’t think,” he apologizes, and Bucky can hear the guilt and unhappiness in those words. Steve isn’t mad at him for needing the smell to go away. He's mad at himself for not being able to foresee that the rubbing alcohol might be a trigger for the other man. 

Bucky ducks his head and rubs his thumb absently over the metal plating of his left arm, eyes heavy with exhaustion.

“I could have killed them. The Soldier wanted to. He thought about how he would do it, and how easy it would be without you or the Hulk or Thor around,” he whispers instead of acknowledging what Steve had said. 

Steve sighs, and a fresh cotton swab starts to dab at the gash on his forehead, this time damp only with water from the sink. 

“But what did Bucky Barnes do?” he probes, using a Q-Tip to smear antibiotic cream across the cut. It's deep, but, not enough so to need stitches. Head wounds just have a habit of being particularly messy ones.

Bucky’s entire body goes stiff at that, and he looks up at Steve, assessing, not quite sure how to take that question. 

So Steve repeats it. 

“The Soldier wanted to hurt them. But what did Bucky Barnes choose to do, instead?”

Bucky’s brow furrows, tugging uncomfortably at the gash on his temple that Steve is currently covering with a sterile bandage. What did he chose to do?

“I… I went and sat in the closet, and ate cereal, until I felt better?” he answers, wondering if this is some sort of trick question.

Steve seems satisfied by the answer, though, and sits back on his heels, his hands resting on Bucky’s knees, gentle and unassuming.

“So, when you knew you were about to lose control, you removed yourself from the situation, sought out a quiet, isolated space where you couldn’t hurt anyone, and waited until you were in control of yourself, again, before you came out?”

It seems like a simple enough question, but, the meaning that’s layered on top of those words hits Bucky in the chest like a punch. 

He hadn’t thought about it like that. 

“I… I guess I did, yeah,” he ventures, finally, wondering what that all meant, exactly. He could have hurt them, could have killed every single one of them…

But he didn’t.

He made the choice to ignore the Winter Soldier. Bucky Barnes _chose_ not to hurt anyone.

He sags forward and feels a pang in his chest when Steve catches him without hesitation, letting himself be pulled up to his feet again and led from the bathroom. 

“The things you did do not define who you are, Bucky. The only thing that defines us is the choices we make,” Steve murmurs, helping the tired man pull on a pair of sweatpants and a loose, plain grey t-shirt. 

The clean, dry fabric feels cool against Bucky’s overheated skin, and he feels revitalized enough by it that he manages to follow Steve to the kitchen on his own steam, sitting down at the kitchen table with a heavy feeling in his stomach. 

“You aren’t mad at me, for thinking that you were wiping me?” he asks Steve’s back, watching the man dump out the cartons of still warm Chinese food onto plates for them. 

Steve’s expression is patient, and kind, when he turns around to sit at the table, choosing the chair closest to Bucky’s and setting their plates down on the smooth wooden surface. He leaves one hand on the table, as well, with the palm up and fingers relaxed. Inviting, but not pushing Bucky to do anything. 

“I will never, ever get mad at you for something like that, Bucky. After what Hydra did to you, it makes sense that you would be uncertain, and need to be reassured that we aren’t the same. You have no reason to believe us, until we earn your trust,” Steve soothes, watching as Bucky picks up his fork and pokes at the food on his plate. Orange chicken and white sticky rice and crab rangoons, with sweet orange sauce drizzled across them. Just the way Bucky always likes it. 

He looks at Steve’s hand, still resting innocently on the table beside the other man’s plate. Bucky knows Steve won't be angry or upset if he chooses not to do it. 

He hesitantly reaches out to rest his right hand against Steve’s palm, staring resolutely at his food so he doesn’t have to see the smile he knows is splitting Steve’s face. His cheeks are burning enough, as it is, and he tries to ignore the warmth that spreads through him when those fingers carefully lace through his own, still lax ones. 

It's innocent, and simple. There is little significance to just touching palms like this.

It feels really nice. 

“I trust _you_ ,” he whispers finally, scooping up a forkful of rice and orange chicken.

It tastes sweet on his tongue. 

There's something so very boring about sitting at the table and eating dinner with Steve. It's easy, and uncomplicated. Simple. 

He likes it. He likes that it doesn't require any hard decisions to just sit there quietly and hold Steve’s hand, while they eat crab rangoons together. It is easy not to think about how terrible the day had started out, or the dark shadows that had threatened to consume him that morning. 

He remembers Natasha’s soothing touch in his hair, and the easy way Clint had slung his arm across the couch behind Bucky’s back. The way they had left room for him between them, like it's where he actually belonged. 

Like this place is somewhere he can stay forever.

Steve says that Bucky has a choice, and that today, he had chosen not to hurt the people he’d come to consider something akin to a real family. That these people care about him, and will never hurt him, or treat him like Hydra once had. 

Steve, who sits with him while he has his panic attack, even though Bucky had aimed a crushing blow at him only moments before, and talks him through it.

Who says he is proud of Bucky, and that he is safe, and no one will hurt him ever again. 

Bucky smiles faintly and shifts his fingers around Steve’s so he has a better grip, deciding he likes the way his hand looks when it is wrapped up in the other man’s. 

He doesn't catch the affectionate stare Steve fixes him with when he finally takes complete hold of the hand he’s simply been resting his own on top of a moment ago. He's distracted by the ache of happiness in his chest at finally allowing himself to make a choice to do something that merely makes him feel good, rather than arguing with the Soldier that it is somehow necessary to the mission.

There was something about Steve Rogers that made him believe that maybe, one day, he could can to call Stark Tower ‘home’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the sake of this chapter, and the importance of giving Bucky a way to manage his own panic attacks, we're going to pretend that Froot Loops have started to produce their cereal with each color ring having a different, identifying flavor. Because the fact that this rainbow clusterfuck cereal is only one flavor is the dumbest, and laziest, marketing mishap I've ever encountered and I refuse to acknowledge it as reality.


	4. No, I Don't Remember Us Falling in Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Soldier starts to have doubts about his ability to carry out the mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clint is a Disney Princess fan and is apparently dead set on recruiting Bucky to the dark side. 
> 
> This chapter is a bit on the angsty side, and there is some dysphoria in regards to how Bucky views his metal arm here.  
>    
> Chapter title from ["Remember Us" by Gabriel Royal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEjYmO5-dLk).

Some days are better than others.

Today is not one of those days.

“Bucky, please come out,” Steve sighs from the other side of the bathroom door, knocking gently on the wood despite the hint of desperation in his voice. 

The Soldier ignores him as near freezing water pounds over his head, soaking his clothing and plastering his hair to his skull.

He can still hear Gabriel Royal’s “Remember Us” playing in the other room and feel the phantom touch of Steve’s mouth against his own. 

“Bucky, please. It was an accident, I’m okay, really,” Steve pleads again, banging on the door a little harder this time. 

It’s been such a boringly normal day. Clint and Natasha come by with fresh bagels and cream cheese from the bakery down the street for breakfast, and the Soldier eats three of them before he's satisfied. They stay with him until lunch time while Steve runs a few errands, watching _Jurassic Park_ on the couch. Natasha lets him rest his head on her lap and Clint seems completely unperturbed by Bucky’s legs ending up draped across his own. 

He's been at Stark Tower for five months, now, and everyone has grown used to Bucky’s increasing need for affection and physical reassurance. His therapist makes everyone aware that it's Bucky’s attempt to reestablish human contact and rebuild physical boundaries that had been torn down in his years at the mercy of Hydra. 

He's reaching out to the people around him because he feels safe enough to do so, and, when you know why he needs a safe space to do something as common as shake another person’s hand, it's hard to turn him away. 

He never pushes anyone to do anything they're uncomfortable with, and even Tony is beyond the initial shock of the Winter Soldier sitting just shy of his shoulder when he comes to watch him work on Bucky’s replacement arm. It's Tony’s new pride and joy; a fully functional arm that will give Bucky total range of motion, like his current arm, but with completely sensory attachment. While the arm of the Winter Soldier feels depth and pressure, it doesn't feel warmth, or pain. It is a tool, as much as he had been, and tools don't need to feel the heat of another person’s skin. 

Steve comes back with Chinese food from Bucky’s favorite restaurant, filling the Tower with the smell of pork fried rice and soy sauce. 

It pulls Tony from his lab, Sam from his afternoon nap, and even Pepper comes down from her office to join them for lunch.

It feels nice, to be in a room full of people that don't want to kill him or use him. 

Their company leaves him feeling warmer and fuller than the food ever could, and he's still floating on that cloud of contentment when he follows Steve to their living room, settling down on the couch with him to watch a movie. Bucky finds he enjoys movies a lot more now than he ever had in his childhood. It's easier to talk when he can focus most of his attention on the screen, and it's a chance to live in another world for a little while. A world without the Winter Soldier.

He feels Steve’s hand rest carefully against the back of his metal one, drawing his attention away from the animated Rapunzel (Clint insists that he will enjoy it if he likes _Brave_ , and Bucky has to admit the simplicity of the animated films is relaxing) on the screen and down to where they are connected. 

It looks wrong. Steve will become tainted by the darkness if he touches it for much longer.

He pulls his hand out from under Steve’s palm and carefully withdraws it inside the sleeve of his hoodie, wondering again, not for the first nor the last time, if there is a way to just rip it off his body entirely. 

“Please don’t. It’s… It’s not mine,” he says in a low, flat tone, wondering if maybe he can sit on Steve’s other side and they can hold hands that way, instead. 

The Soldier growls that holding hands is unnecessary and illogical. There is no tactical benefit or advantage to letting Steve touch him that way, when he is clearly already quite taken in with their ruse. There is no point in doing more than is needed to keep the story going. 

_“But what if I want to just because it might feel nice?”_ he asks himself, unsure if he understands the Soldier’s reasoning. Surely there is no advantage to holding hands with Steve, but, there isn’t any harm in it, either. And if it isn’t going to harm the mission then why can't he indulge in something that just feels… nice?

_“Because you don’t deserve nice things. You are a weapon.”_

The voice is cold and calm and he isn’t sure if it is the voice of the Soldier who speaks such harsh truths, or the voice of Bucky Barnes, reminding him about the monster he has become.

“It is a weapon to cause pain. Not something to... enjoy nice things with,” he whispers, eyes staring distantly at the screen, only barely absorbing what is happening in the movie.

He can vaguely hear Rapunzel singing as she swung through the tower, wondering just when her life will begin.

Bucky decides that is definitely the million dollar question.

Steve’s hand touches his jaw and he turns his head to look up, struggling to keep the squirming guilt in his stomach at bay when he sees the sadness in his blue eyes. He is sad and it's the Soldier’s fault. He has put that sadness there. 

“I’m sorry,” he sighs, going still when the other man leans in to press his lips against his forehead.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for, Buck. And.. for what it’s worth, you’re wrong about your arm. When it was Hydra’s, it was a weapon, but now it’s yours, and yours alone. Which means you get to choose what you want to use it for,” Steve says in a soft voice, standing up and moving towards the television to turn the movie off.

He touches a few buttons on the stereo system, and suddenly there’s soft piano music filling the room, the gentle tp-tp of a drum setting the beat.

Modern technology is incredibly convenient, Bucky decides, as Steve approaches him, looking nervous but determined to somehow prove his words to Bucky. 

“Dance with me?” he asks, offering his hands to Bucky so that the other man has the choice of taking them or refusing them. 

Bucky is so stunned by the unexpected request that he takes them without really thinking about it, letting Steve pull him into a gentle, swaying motion. Steve makes sure to keep the metal hand clasped in his own while guiding Bucky’s other hand to settle on his waist, smiling down at him with so much happiness in his eyes it makes Bucky’s heart throb painfully. 

They are dancing in the middle of Steve’s apartment, in a Tower full of superheroes, and Bucky is wearing one of Steve’s stupidly tight t-shirts that somehow manages to look oversized on the smaller man, and jeans. It's like that first time they danced together in 1941, though the location is vastly improved.

The plating in his arm whirs faintly as it shifts to settle into the new position, but Steve seems unbothered by the mechanical sound of it, instead choosing to pull their joined hands up so he can press his lips against the polished alloy.

It makes Bucky’s chest ache, and he wonders if, perhaps, maybe Steve is right. He has a rather irritating habit of doing that these days.

Bucky isn’t quite sure, exactly, how long they stand there in their living room, swaying back and forth to song after song, and somehow managing to get closer with each note. 

Time tends to slip away when he's with Steve.

And then a new song that Bucky is unfamiliar with starts to whisper through the speakers, and he finds himself getting lost in the lyrics.

_“No, I don't remember us falling in love, but I'm sure that it happened._

Bucky looks up at Steve, and the other man’s face is suddenly very, very close to his own.

_“No, I don't remember us falling in love, this sort of thing is old fashioned.”_

When Steve’s lips press against his own Bucky loses all sense of space and time, his fingers tightening around the other man’s t-shirt. Distantly, the song is still playing, but in that moment there is only the gentle, shy probe of Steve’s tongue into his mouth and the warmth of fingers sliding up into his hair.

Heat blooms in the pit of his stomach and he presses himself against Steve from head to toe, feeling as if he's drowning in the kiss, every nerve ending on fire with electricity.

In that moment he wants nothing more than to let Steve take him to the bedroom that has become theirs at some point in these past few months and let himself be stripped down to his core and taken apart. Steve will put him back together again. Steve always knows how to put the pieces back together.

But then the lips are gone from his, and he can feel the pressure of something prying at the fingers of his metal hand.

The Soldier drops Steve’s hand from his grip and stares in shock at the bruises blossoming where he had nearly crushed the limb. He hadn’t been able to feel how hard he was squeezing and was too distracted to be consciously aware of what he was doing.

It is a harsh reminder of why he is here, and what he really is. 

He is a weapon. Weapons do not deserve to be kissed by the men they are taking advantage of. Weapons do not get to have happiness.

_“I warned you.”_

The Soldier escapes to the safety of the bathroom and locks the door behind him, turning on the water in the large shower to as cold as it will go before flinging himself beneath the icy spray. Maybe if he stays here long enough he will freeze again, and Steve won't have to worry about getting his hand crushed because he asks him for a dance. 

He vaguely registers the electronic locks on the door clicking open – Jarvis, that traitor – and does his best to remain blank and impassive as shockingly warm hands are grabbing at his shoulders, pulling him out from the shower and onto the bathroom floor. 

All it takes is a single glimpse of Steve’s hand, the shape of metal plating bruised into the flesh in stark blacks and purples, for the guilt to come crashing down on him once more. He doesn't deserve Steve’s arms around him, or the touch that somehow manages to be gentle even as it rips open his frozen clothing and peels it away from his skin. 

He's a monster, who has taken advantage of this man’s kindness, for his own sake. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, surrendering to Steve’s careful touch as he is lifted off the bathroom floor and wrapped in a thick, heavy towel, carried into the safe darkness of the bedroom. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, feeling himself get tucked beneath a pile of blankets, still unable to look Steve in the eye. 

“I’m sorry,” come the words one more time as Steve slides into the bed beside him and curls his arms around the Soldier’s prone, shivering form, fingers running through his wet hair. 

“It’s okay, Bucky. I forgive you. It was an accident. I’ll be fine by morning. It’s not worth beating yourself up over,” Steve murmurs against his scalp, and Bucky closes his eyes, desperately willing himself to believe those words, spoken in such a way that there's really no room for argument.

There was something about Steve Rogers that makes you want to believe everything he says.

Bucky buries his nose against the swell of Steve’s Adam’s Apple and breathes in the smell of sweat and sticky sweet orange sauce that clings to the skin here, careful to keep his metal arm at his side where it can't hurt anyone.

He doesn't want to hurt anyone anymore. Especially not Steve. 

At some point along the way, the Soldier has started actively wanting to be the man he’d been pretending to be this entire time. 

Will the ghost of Bucky Barnes torment him if the Soldier takes his place in Steve’s heart?

They spend the rest of the day in that bed, the Soldier wrapped up tight in an embrace he does not deserve, Steve’s fingers rubbing in gentle, rhythmic circles in his hair. 

That night he dreams of a man with his face and a cold, cramped room where he can't breathe.

The Soldier knows only darkness.

But maybe Bucky Barnes can find his way back to the light again.


	5. I Bet My Life On You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is this a date?"
> 
> "It is if you want it to be, Buck."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter finally earns that explicit rating.
> 
> Title from ['Bet My Life' by Imagine Dragons.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QlqqhzLVFo)

It is six months after his arrival before Bucky is allowed to leave Stark Tower. His therapist informs them that his mental state has vastly improved since coming to her care, with the most notable upturn in emotional healing having occurred in the last few weeks.

No one will say it out loud, but all of them are pretty sure this has to do with the fact Tony has finally finished Bucky’s new arm. 

The instant Tony is finished testing, Bucky is there without a moment of hesitation, his eyes full of something akin to desperation. 

It takes a several hours for Tony, with the assistance of several highly skilled surgeons, to carefully remove his current arm, not wanting to set off any alarms or poisons or emergency GPS locators that might be programmed into the piece of weaponry in the case of an unscheduled attempt at removal. Another innumerable amount of hours are spent gingerly replacing the Hydra shoulder port with his own, making sure the nerve endings are all in place. This is the tricky part, as there is no assurance that the inevitable pain of the procedure won't trigger something in Bucky, but, Steve’s presence manages to keep him mostly calm throughout.

It is a very, very long day, and after a tense, lengthy couple hours spent attaching the replacement arm to its port, Bucky is examining his new prosthetic limb.

It has a flesh tone base that wraps around it, lining up seamlessly with Bucky’s shoulder matching the tone of his own skin. Like his old arm, it moves in every single way he wishes it to. His fingers are clumsy at first, but, as his body gets used to using the new arm, his dexterity improves. 

The biggest difference for Bucky, besides the blessed absence of shiny chrome and moving metal plating, is that he can actually _feel_ with it. Not just pressure and depth, but heat and cold and _texture._

He's able to tell Tony which mug has iced tea and which mug has hot tea. He can feel the softness of his t-shirt beneath his fingers, and the roughness of the calluses on his other palm. 

He can feel pain when Tony tests the settings with a needle, making sure the sensors in the silicone flesh are properly transmitting the sensations to Bucky’s brain. Tony is unsure when he asks that the settings be left at one hundred percent, but, it is his arm and his choice. He wants to be able to feel everything, now that he can. Even pain.

Once Bucky is able to truly feel what he was holding, no one can stop him from touching every single thing in Stark Tower.

Clint tries to point out that Bucky has always been able to properly feel things with his flesh arm this entire time, but, his heart isn’t really in it to burst the other man’s bubble.

His therapist tells him the change is important because it affects his self-image and how he perceives himself. It is easier to move past who he had been as the Winter Soldier without a constant reminder of it attached to his shoulder. Bucky isn’t unwilling to acknowledge that his arm is prosthetic – what he has been desperately trying to deny is the appearance of it as a weapon, and the memories he associates with the red star and metal plating. She says it is a form of body dysmorphia, where Bucky does not feel that the arm belongs to him, and that it is defective, which makes him, as a whole, flawed.

He isn’t quite sure she's pleased to learn he had punched a wall with his new arm just to experience the pain of it, but, she understands, at least, why he had done it.

Weapons don't feel pain.

But _Bucky_ feels pain. 

It means that, perhaps, he can finally have a chance to try being a person again. 

Steve hasn’t kissed him, and doesn't ask him to dance again, not since that first time Bucky had hurt him, though.

Bucky has been too afraid of hurting him, and Steve senses it even if neither of them particularly enjoy the renewed boundaries.

Today is different, though, because today Bucky is allowed to leave Stark Tower. 

He's wearing an incredibly expensive pair of jeans, one of the many that Pepper has filled his closet with, and another of Steve’s t-shirts. This one is red and green and reminds Bucky of Christmases huddled next to a tiny space heater with Steve and enough hot chocolate to sink a ship while they listen to the radio. It's still too big for him, but, Bucky will trade form fitting for the safety of having Steve’s smell wrapping around him like a security blanket. 

If Steve notices, he doesn't say anything, but the corner of his mouth is quirked up in a smile. Both of them wear dark sunglasses and baseball caps to hide their identities, though Bucky has foregone the sweatshirt that Steve is wearing. 

His once metal arm is bare to the world and he's lying if he says he isn’t nervous. Before, when his arm is uncovered, it means he's on a mission.

But now he's going to walk through downtown Manhattan and no one is going to even notice him. He is just going to be another face in the crowd, with an arm that isn’t terrifying and made of metal and blood.

Or so he hopes. 

“You ready?” Steve asks gently, and Bucky wants to throw up with nerves when Steve reaches out to take his hand, his prosthetic hand, and laces their fingers together. 

“You sure I won’t break them?” he says instead of answering the question, unable to meet Steve’s eyes. The sight of flesh, bruised and nearly crushed, is still fresh in his memory, and he nearly flinches away when Steve’s hand squeezes around his.

It is warm against his palm, and soft. 

“I trust you.”

The Soldier feels gutted by those three little words and has to look away for a moment, flexing his hand experimentally around the other man’s.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he mumbles, face pinching when Steve chuckles softly and leads them towards the front door.

“Well, you always did say I had a penchant for making rash decisions,” Steve replies with a shrug, stopping just short of leaving the building. His expression grows serious and he looks down at Bucky again, keeping a firm hold of his hand lest he have any doubts that it is exactly what Steve wants.

“For real, though, Buck. Are you ready?”

Bucky swallows thickly, not sure how to say ‘Yes’ without sounding like he is about to fall apart at the seams, when Jarvis’ voice sounds over the intercom.

“Mister Stark thanks you for using the door, this time, and would like to remind you to please come back the way you left with as little structural damage as possible,” he announces in his usual cool, even tone, breaking the spell of anxiety that has settled over Bucky as he aims an indignant shout of protest at the ceiling about how that's rich coming from Tony.

Bucky's look of utter offense gets Steve grinning. 

When he feels that Jarvis has been made sufficiently aware of his thoughts on Tony’s parting words, Bucky finally nods in answer to his question and tentatively squeezes Steve’s hand, watching the fingers flex around it.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

He takes a deep breath and lets Steve push the glass doors open, following him out into the bright sunshine. 

And nothing happens.

Nobody dies, the world doesn't explode, and the Soldier certainly hasn’t gone on a killing rampage.

The sidewalk is fairly busy, given the nice weather, and Bucky finds himself fascinated by the bustle of people going by.

No one pays them the slightest heed. Not a single wandering glance or stare in their direction.

He's just another person out in the city, enjoying the nice day. Not a monster or a weapon.

Just… a human being.

He looks up at Steve to see the other man is smiling warmly down at him, his grip on Bucky’s hand not loosening by even a fraction, despite the fact they are in public and he can be recognized at any second. 

“You still with me, Bucky?”

A small nod before Bucky’s gaze is drawn back to the people walking by them. 

“Yeah, you’ve got me.”

They pass most of the journey to the bakery in silence, Bucky watching the world around him and Steve watching Bucky enjoy this new found freedom. 

Bucky feels his gaze on him even as he watches a woman come out of a nearby convenience store, an infant clutched safely to her chest while she carefully balances several grocery bags in the crook of each elbow. She has a kind face and tired eyes, though he’s pretty sure the exhaustion is directly related to the child in her arms. 

There is a simple pleasure in people watching. Bucky wonders who they are and where they're going; what their lives are like, and what kind of people fill them. 

He doesn't even realize they are at the bakery until Steve is guiding him through a door and the smell of fresh cinnamon and hot coffee fill his senses. 

It is warm in here, and the atmosphere is friendly when he and Steve take a seat in the corner. He can't stop the automatic way his eyes sweep the room, cataloging emergency exits and assessing potential threats. It's the first time he’s been in an unfamiliar place since coming to Stark Tower and he doesn't even realize he's doing it.

Steve catches him doing it and taps a finger against his cheek, drawing his attention back to him. His face grows hot with embarrassment, though the other man makes no move to shame him for what he did, smiling gently and holding up the menu for his perusal, instead. 

Focus and redirect, his therapist calls it. Draw his attention away from his instinctual habits as the Soldier, and redirect it onto something else, instead. Steve has a knack for it, and it's helpful when Bucky is on the verge of a panic attack, or has woken from a particularly bad nightmare. It helps that Steve had experienced the same urges and instincts after he woke up from his deep freeze, and knows how difficult it is to resist them when coupled with an unhealthy dose of PTSD.

The next big challenge comes when the waitress wanders over to introduce herself and take their order, beaming warmly at the two men sitting at her table. Her eyes are dark brown, like her skin, and lined from crinkling when she smiles. Her thick black hair is braided neatly against her scalp and tied back in a pony tail that hangs down her back, tipped with a rainbow of beads that draw Bucky’s attention with their soft, musical clatter.

She seems amused by the fascinated way Bucky admires her hair, taking Steve’s order of two coffees, one black and one with extra sugar, before walking off, waving her head a little to make the beads click together for their audience.

Steve reaches out to take Bucky’s hand once more, rubbing his thumb in gentle circles over the smooth skin on the back, an expression of fondness fixed on his face.

Bucky studies him, trying to commit every detail of this moment to memory.

Steve looks nice when he's happy. Bucky likes to see him happy this way; carefree and with nothing weighing him down.

It makes the guilt over this all being just a con by the Soldier sit heavier in his heart. 

He doesn't deserve to have this happiness with Steve. He doesn't deserve any of this.

But… while he's here, it won't be terrible for him to let himself enjoy it, right? He's the center of Steve’s world right now.

He’s never been the center of anyone’s world before. 

Steve had always been the center of his. 

Neither of them hardly notice their waitress as she comes and goes after that, and she does her best not to intrude on their private moment together, smiling fondly at the contentment that radiates off the pair of them. 

They talk about nothing in particular. The new animated movie Clint had brought for them to watch. Thor’s last visit and the hole it had left in the side of Stark Tower. Jane Foster’s baked macaroni and cheese. Pepper’s determination to get Bucky’s haircut just the right length so that it's long, the way he likes it, but not too long as to get in his way. 

It’s just so easy and comfortable, sitting in a booth in a bakery in downtown New York with Steve, eating eggs and greasy bacon and talking about their friends. 

Neither of them mention a dance that ended too soon.

It’s Bucky who blurts out the obvious question, and once he says it he wishes he can take it back so he doesn't feel like dying of mortification.

“Is this a date?”

He says it when Steve is in the middle of describing how Sam had nearly broken their television yesterday, after he accidentally threw his game controller at it in a fit of frustration because Steve kicked his ass at Mario Kart.

Steve pauses and cocks his head at Bucky, as if he's sizing him up before daring to give him an answer.

“It is if you want it to be, Buck,” he says finally, hesitating, waiting to see what the other man’s response will be.

Bucky’s eyes flit down to the table, where their fingers are still tangled comfortably together on the smooth wooden surface. Their waitress might recognize Steve at any moment, will see the name on his credit card when he pays and put two and two together. She can tell the world that Captain America is being intimate with another man if she wants to.

And yet, Steve seems completely unbothered by any of this. He makes no move to pull away whenever she comes over, and no attempt to try and explain it away as him supporting a friend making his first foray into the world after half a year inside.

“I do.. want it to be,” he murmurs finally, feeling almost shy at the way this makes Steve’s face light up. The other man pulls his hand up and presses his lips gently to his knuckles, mouth curving in a smile against the skin.

“Then it’s a date.”

Bucky doesn’t remember how they make it back to Stark Tower.

He doesn’t really care either, and none of that matters because Steve’s mouth is on his the instant their door swings shut. 

The Soldier is yelling from the back of his mind that he has no right to be doing this. That this is the territory of Bucky Barnes, and he is not Bucky Barnes. That he already has Steve wrapped around his finger and this is completely unnecessary.

He closes him out for the first time since he had become the Soldier. 

He's going to be Bucky Barnes, even if just for one night.

And Bucky Barnes is peeling his shirt over his head before tackling Steve’s, throwing it in the corner somewhere like it personally offends him with its existence.

He's about to yank at the other man’s belt before gentle hands stop him, and he’s guided backwards until his legs thunk against the edge of the bed, making him reflexively sit down.

“We have all the time in the world, now, Buck. I plan to make the most of every minute of it,” he murmurs, in a voice so rich with lust it's positively sinful. It sends a shudder down Bucky’s spine and he lays himself back across the bed, spreading out like a feast waiting to be plundered.

“Then come and put your money where your mouth is,” he growls, and he has a moment to enjoy the feral need that flashes through Steve’s eyes before he’s on him, mouth hot against his jaw and hands seemingly _everywhere_ all at once. 

Bucky sends Steve’s hat flying and somehow manages to hit the iHome with enough force to turn it on, soft jazz starting to fill the apartment once more. 

It's an accident, hitting the machine, but neither of them make a move to turn it off as Gabriel Royal’s voice fills the room once more. Bucky’s mouth feels as swollen as Steve’s looks when the man breaks their kiss, both of them hesitating only briefly at the memory of what had happened the last time this song played in the apartment.

“I’m with you,” Bucky whispers, pulling Steve down for another kiss and parting his legs so the other can settle between them, groaning at the promise of friction against his aching cock trapped in the too tight designer jeans. 

Steve’s mouth leaves his and trails burning kisses down the length of his throat to find his nipple, tongue swiping over the pebbling bud before his lips surround it and he begins to suck, eliciting a surprised whimper of pleasure from the man beneath him. Bucky never realized how sensitive his chest can be, and Steve certainly seems quite intent on exploiting this newly discovered knowledge.

Hands are struggling to undo belts and shove at zippers and Bucky is far too distracted by the feeling of Steve’s teeth tugging at his nipple to be any help at all, his flesh hand buried in Steve’s hair and the other one firmly clasped around a handful of blankets.

He isn’t going to risk losing control and ending this too early again, not when it feels so good to finally be beneath Steve like this.

“Steve, please,” he whispers breathlessly, and Steve’s mouth moves to worry at the other nipple, licking and suckling the sensitive bud until it's red and wet from the attention, stinging pleasantly. Bucky whimpers when his aching cock is finally freed from its denim cage, lifting his hips so Steve can shuck them off with his underwear, shoes, and socks.

He’s naked beneath Steve for the first time in his entire life, and yet it feels like coming home. 

“Steve.”

His name falls like a reverent sigh from Bucky’s lips when Steve’s mouth ghosts over the sweat damp muscles of his stomach, pausing to dip his tongue into his belly button just to see the other man squirm at the teasing. 

“Please.”

Another tormenting brush of lips against his hipbone, so very, very close to where he wants them to be and at the same time a million miles away. 

He avoids the numerous scars and marks marring his body, and Bucky realizes Steve’s only doing this because he hasn’t gotten to ask him if it’s something he's comfortable with, which Bucky appreciates. He isn’t sure himself, yet, if he wants someone as perfect and untainted as Steve to touch the ugly, evil scars that twist his flesh. Maybe someday he will get there, and he's sure that Steve will welcome the chance to explore these parts of Bucky when he's given it. 

Bucky ignores the ache in his chest when he thinks about getting to be with Steve long enough to have a ‘someday’ to look forward to.

Steve takes Bucky’s prosthetic hand and guides it to his hair, shooting him a look that’s half desire, half question, tongue darting out to lap away a bead of sweat from the soft skin of Bucky’s pelvis.

Bucky swallows thickly and tentatively, anxiously, tangles his fingers in dark blond hair, carefully pushing his head where he wants it to be. Steve grins, letting Bucky know this is exactly what he wants, and follows the pointed guidance, tongue finally, _finally_ grazing across the leaking tip of his cock. 

Steve doesn’t need much instruction after that. It’s all Bucky can do to hold on for the ride when, without warning, Steve swallows him down to the root, throat convulsing around the head and mouth hotter than it has any right to be. 

It drags a whining shout of pleasure from Bucky and he fights with every ounce of willpower he had left not to thrust up into the welcoming, velvety heat around his cock, hand shaking where it lays tangled in Steve’s hair. 

The other man lifts his head up until only the tip is left between his lips, keeping his eyes locked on Bucky, who has since found himself unable to tear his gaze away from the sight of Captain America fucking his mouth down onto his cock like a professional. Where had Steve learned to do this and why hadn’t they been doing it before?

“Steve.. Steve, please..!” he begs, seemingly reduced to those two words alone as the heat and pressure began to build inside him, like a coil about to burst. He tries to warn Steve with a tug of his hair, but that only seems to spur him on more, taking Bucky all the way down his throat until his nose is buried in the wiry hair at the base and swallowing once, twice, three times.

Bucky is undone.

He comes with the force of ninety some odd years of repression and denial, spilling his release down Steve’s throat. The other man swallows every single drop, drawing back from him so he can lick his softening cock clean, only stopping when Bucky pushes vaguely at his head from the buzzing pain-pleasure of overstimulation.

He can’t help but huff a quiet laugh at the smug satisfaction on Steve’s face when he crawls back up the length of Bucky’s body, tongue tasting of Bucky as they kiss. His nipples ache when Steve’s chest presses against his own and he relishes it because it means this really happened, and it isn’t all just a torturous dream.

He can feel the line of Steve’s cock doing its best to drill a hole straight through his jeans and Bucky hums thoughtfully, slipping his hands between them so he can undo his pants the rest of the way, shoving them down to his thighs.

“I don’t think I can do anything nearly that impressive,” he admits in a low hum, feeling Steve’s breath hitching against his neck when he gets his fingers around his cock, “But I’m pretty good with my hands.”

He explores his cock with touch alone to become better acquainted with it, since he can't see it where it's pressed snug against his stomach, trailing up the thick vein and ghosting over the foreskin, teasing at the tip where it just barely peeks out from behind the fold of skin. It makes it easier to slide his hand up and down the length of him without lube to aid the way, and Bucky moaned when Steve shows his appreciation by sucking a dark bruise into the flesh of his throat, fingers plucking and rubbing at his oversensitive nipples.

There’s only a brief pause when Steve pulls back enough to meet Bucky’s gaze with a question in his eyes, thumb grazing carefully across the lovebite he’d just made.

Bucky answers him with a hard kiss and a quick jerk of his wrist, drawing a low, rumbling moan from the man above him. 

He lifts his right hand up so he could lick it to make it even better when Steve gently grabs his wrist and gives him another quiet, meaningful look.

“Use your other hand, please, if that’s okay,” he whispers, leaning down to press a softer kiss to Bucky’s slackened mouth. 

Why is Steve so set on making him use his prosthetic hand for everything? Is it some sort of.. fetish thing for him? Or worse, is he attracted to the Winter Soldier?

He doesn’t say any of this out loud, but his uncertainty must have shown on his face because Steve smiles softly, resting his forehead against Bucky’s.

“I want to show you that it doesn’t bother me. That I love you no matter what, and that I embrace your arm, and the Winter Soldier, as being part of the whole that makes you up. This you that I love. Not the memory of the Bucky Barnes I used to know, but the Bucky Barnes I know, now. The Bucky Barnes who eats three bowls of Froot Loops for breakfast while watching cartoons on the couch with Clint, and lets Natasha put her jeans on him so she can see how flattering they look from the back, and cracks jokes when Tony is up to his usual antics..”

He trails off, brushing his fingers through Bucky’s hair and trailing them down to cup at the back of his neck.

“The Bucky Barnes who pulled me from the river and saved my life in more ways than he can ever imagine.”

It’s almost too much for Bucky to bear and the heaviness of the truth in Steve’s words is like a weight on his heart, squeezing like a vice until he can hardly breathe.

“But what if I’m not the Bucky Barnes you think I am?” he asks in a desperate croak, staring up at Steve as his vision begins to swim with tears. 

Steve’s smiling against his lips and there are fingers stroking away the tears on his cheeks, his body a warm, heavy, reassuring weight on top of Bucky. 

“Then I’ll still be here, waiting for him to introduce himself to me,” he says simply, like it’s the only obvious choice. 

Bucky surges up to kiss him with nothing short of desperate, aching need, clutching at Steve with his entire body as he rocks his hips up against the other man’s. Their cocks grind together, slick with Steve’s spit from earlier and precome, and Bucky moans into his mouth, unwilling to move away from the other man long enough to get a hand between them.

It’s quick and dirty and it’s perfect, their bodies sliding smoothly against one another as they kiss, hands sliding over sweaty, rippling muscle only to end up clasped together against the bed spread. 

The entire time, Steve’s words are repeating over and over in Bucky’s mind, spurring him onto to greater heights of need and desire. 

He doesn’t hear the jazz music playing in the background, anymore.

All he can hear is Steve’s voice saying ‘I love you’ on a loop and Bucky wonders if he can drown himself in the way those words feel murmured into his skin.

Steve buries his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck and sucks another bruise into the flesh that will fade by tomorrow night, hips rutting desperately against the other man’s as he chases the orgasm that’s barreling down on them both.

Bucky can feel the weight of Steve’s hand in his own and his metal fingers don’t crush it this time but fold easily around it, as if it were always meant to take up the space between them and he’s close so very close and Steve’s mouth is hot against his jaw and his knees are drawing up so that Steve can grind closer, harder, _faster_ -

They come together like a crashing tidal wave and a string of curse words Bucky has not heard Steve utter since 1944 fall from his lips like a prayer, moaned into the bruise covered expanse of his throat. The wet, sticky heat between their bodies borders on uncomfortable, but neither of them can be persuaded to move just then, tangled up in a sweaty, sated pile of limbs. 

There’s a dampness on Bucky’s cheeks and he reaches up with the hand not currently locked around Steve’s to brush away the lingering tears, turning his head so he can bury his face in his sweaty hair and panting softly as they come down from their high. 

It's undeniably the best sex Bucky has ever had.

“We… We need a shower,” Steve murmurs with little strength, making no move to get up or so much as roll off the man beneath him. Bucky grunts in agreement, only to immediately counteract that statement by closing his eyes and sliding his arm over Steve’s back, intending to prevent him from doing any such a thing. 

Steve’s free hand winds its way up to find his hair and combs through the sweaty locks and Bucky knows that if they fall asleep now it’d be completely ridiculous. Steve’s pants are still around his knees, even. 

It’s with some difficulty that they manage to, at least, kick those the rest of the way off the bed with his shoes, without dislodging themselves from their current position, and a few fumbled attempts get the sheets tugged up to their waists. Distantly, Bucky can still hear the iHome filling the room with the sound of a piano and saxophone, but he’s too far gone with exhaustion to really notice which song it is. 

They're never going to hear the end of it for napping in the middle of the day, but, Bucky lets that thought roll off him with a vague shrug of his shoulders, face pressing into the top of Steve’s head. 

There was something about Steve Rogers that makes it hard to really care what anyone else thinks. 

All that matters is Steve is here, and he cares for Bucky. This Bucky. The Bucky he is right now. 

For the first night of many nights, Bucky Barnes falls asleep without the sound of the Winter Soldier’s voice in his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, when I originally started this story it was only supposed to be a couple chapters. But you can see it has now blossomed into a behemoth of a story. As a result the early chapters do read as a bit rushed in the context of the whole but chapters have been added down the road that go back to these early months in Bucky's time spent at Stark Tower, to help fill in the time gaps in his recovery.


	6. In The Dark, Count Mistakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wasn’t born a blood-stained soldier. (I kill because they took away my heart.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from [You've Got Time by Regina Spektor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9_isl1jjHc), which was technically written for Orange Is The New Black but is definitely about Bucky Barnes.
> 
> Trigger warning for self harm as Bucky tries to come to terms with the memories of the Winter Soldier flooding in.
> 
> This chapter has a happy ending, though, I promise.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here!](http://buckybarnnes.tumblr.com)

The next morning, when Bucky wakes up, it isn’t to the comfortable feeling of Steve’s arms circled around his waist, or the press of his lips against the back of his neck.

He can't feel either of those things, though it is certainly the way their bodies are left tangled together on the bed, naked and sticky after they had woken up sometime before the sun and had sex again. Some part of Bucky remembers that, remembers Steve spooning up behind him and the slick weight of his cock between Bucky’s thighs as he rocks between them, and his hand on Bucky’s own need, stroking him in time with his thrusting. 

The rest of him is only conscious of the feeling of wet heat between his fingers and the smell of metal on the air, and he opened his eyes to see the walls splashed with crimson and gore. 

He chokes down a scream and shoves himself free of Steve so that he can turn and see the other man.

No blood, no wounds. He's sleeping peacefully in a mess of sheets, his mouth still swollen from their activities the day before and chest dotted in love bites that mirror the ones covering Bucky’s own neck and shoulders.

He looks up at the walls and sees that they are also quite normal, a soft blue color, unstained with red. 

He has only a few, brief moments to digest this before he’s hit with a wall of pain, falling off the bed and curling inwards around his head, like he's shielding himself from a physical blow. 

Images and pictures flooding his mind faster than he can track them and he chokes, struggling on air, as the Winter Soldier assaults his mind. 

He sees Steve, bleeding and dying at his own hand, and refusing to fight back.

A school teacher in Idaho that he suffocated, whose murder he had pinned on her husband. All because she's on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that Hydra doesn't want her to share with the world.

A world leader that just wants to make the world a better place. His head had exploded with the force of the shot and his wife had ended up covered in his blood.

A young man studying to join Shield, his body dissolved in acid so that he can be replaced with a Hydra mole. All because he doesn't have family or friends that will miss him.

A familiar face crashed to the forefront of his mind and Bucky can't stop himself from retching, vomiting up bile onto the plush, expensive carpeting. 

He knows that man.

He knows him. 

He has to get away from Steve.

Blindly, he manages to pull on his pants and shirt from yesterday before he escapes the apartment without waking Steve, stumbling down the hallway like he's drunk. He can't focus, he can't think. 

The Winter Soldier is laughing. 

His bare feet take him over familiar steps, and it’s an hour before Tony, still in his sleeping clothes, finds him in his lab, prosthetic arm spread out over the table and a scalpel in the other hand. 

“Whoa whoa whoa, what exactly are you doing? You can’t do that, I worked hard on that!” he protests, wondering if he's really awake or if this is all just some really strange dream. Jarvis had woken him with an urgent warning that James Barnes is in the lab and in dire need of assistance, but this isn't exactly been what he'd been expecting. He thought maybe the arm malfunctioned, or there is something pinching against a nerve and causing pain.

This is so much worse. 

“It isn’t mine. I don’t deserve it. People might think I’m actually human,” Bucky says dully, letting the blade glide through the silicone flesh from shoulder to wrist, his expression dazed and lost. 

Tony doesn't seem to know how to digest that and slowly sits down on a stool opposite the other man, knowing that he has to tread delicately. If Bucky is so far gone as to essentially skin his own arm, because with the pain sensors turned up as high as they are that is certainly what it has to feel like, then one wrong move, one wrong word, could set Bucky back for months in his recovery.

“Did something happen yesterday when you were out with Rogers?” he asks delicately, wincing as Bucky starts to tug the flesh base, peeling it back to expose the metal alloy base underneath. 

“No. I simply remembered what I am.”

Tony is ready to vomit when the Soldier looks up at him, his mind almost blissfully numbed by the roaring pain of cutting away the silicone flesh.

“I’m a monster. A weapon. I killed people. I killed so many people. I don’t deserve to play act at being one of them.”

The Soldier looks away again and back down at his arm, using the scalpel to start working the flesh off his palm. Soon the metal will be all that was left and then people would know that he's something to be feared. Something to be hated and thrown away.

“You were being used by Hydra. It wasn’t your fault,” Tony forces out, struggling against the urge to snatch the scalpel away from Bucky. Rogers is going to give him an earful when this is-

“I killed your parents.”

Whatever thoughts Tony might have had about Steve blaming this whole thing on him are derailed in an instant, his mouth open and eyes comically wide.

Tony.. Well, he had known that. He’d seen the decrypted Hydra files, had seen the field report that the Winter Soldier had caused the car crash that killed Howard and Maria Stark. It’d take a stronger man than him not to initially want to punish Bucky for it. 

But it's hard to blame the brainwashed, tortured prisoner of war, especially when he sits next to you in your lab several days out of the week with a bowl of cereal and looking painfully happy just getting to listen to you prattle about biomechanical engineering. Whereas it is incredibly easy to blame Hydra and everyone that willingly associates with them, because they are the evil waste of society. 

“I know,” he says finally, and the Soldier’s head whips up to look at him so quickly he can hear the bones in his neck creaking. 

“You know, and yet.. you made this for me?”

He gestures at the half desecrated arm and Tony seizes that as his chance to reach out and carefully pry the scalpel from his hand, tossing it into some dark corner to be melted down at a later date.

“Yes, I did. And I would appreciate it if you would stop destroying it in some noble desire to punish yourself for things you couldn’t have prevented,” he growls, voice firm as he pulls the ruined technology towards him. 

The silicone flesh is definitely destroyed and will need replacing. At least the incisions are neat enough, and Tony rummages through his desk for something to seal it up until he can make a new one while Bucky stares vacantly at his face, clearly struggling to come to terms with what he has just learned.

“She died instantly. Maria Stark. She did not suffer. I doubt she even knew what was happening before her head hit the dashboard,” he whispers, and something in Tony’s chest relaxes at hearing that. The accident had never really been as thoroughly investigated as he would have liked. The limits of technology at the time had made it difficult, and, of course, now he could also expect that Hydra had done their best to stamp down any real investigative attempts.

His mother is still dead, but… it helps, strangely, to know that it had been quick and painless for her. 

“And Howard?” he finds himself compelled to ask, and the vague, sour expression of misery that is twisting onto Bucky’s face makes him aware that he’ll probably regret asking.

“He.. It took about an hour for him to bleed out.”

The Soldier looks away, unable to meet Tony’s gaze as the man’s fingers stutter over the flesh of his arm, smearing sealant across the silicone. 

“Part of the car had pierced his abdomen, and he was pinned. Couldn’t move, or escape. Just had to sit there and.. wait to die.”

His head cocks to the side faintly and he stares distantly at the far wall of Tony’s lab, picturing the wreckage in his mind.

“I was going to speed up the process. It wouldn’t do to have someone drive by the wreckage while he was still alive.”

The Soldier can still smell the mud and blood on the breeze. Feel the rain on his skin, and hear the crunch of metal as he wrenched off the driver’s side door. 

“He knew me.”

And at this, Tony goes completely still and sits up, eyes over bright but mouth set into a firm line. Bucky needs to talk about it, and Tony.. Tony needs to hear it. Maybe it will give them both a little closure on what had happened.

“Tell me.”

The Soldier looks up, his expression twisting into something akin to grief.

“He knew me. He.. He called my name. He said, ‘Come to drag me down to hell, then, James?’ and I think he must have believed I was ghost from his past. He was delirious from the blood loss at this point. He never thought that I might be his killer. Why would he? I was supposed to be his friend.”

He swallows thickly and looks down at his right hand, remembering the sticky blood that had been covering it that night. 

Hearing that name from Howard’s mouth had jolted something deep inside him. He had been out of cryo freeze for a few months at that point, and it had been just that long since they had last wiped him. They believed he was finally freed of his original programming, of James Barnes. 

“I reached out to press my hand to the wound in his side, though, I didn’t really.. know why just yet. I knew him. I knew his face. I couldn’t… I couldn’t place him, but I knew I didn’t want him to die, yet. That I needed to hear what he was saying.”

Bucky pauses to fight down the urge to vomit, prosthetic fingers clenching tight enough to send sparks of pain dancing up his arm. 

“He said he was a failure. That he hadn’t been able to find Steve, and that he could never forgive himself for it. He was supposed to be the world’s greatest inventor, and he couldn’t even locate a massive Hydra ship within a few hundred miles of ocean. He felt like he had betrayed Steve, and Peggy. And then.. He apologized to me. For never finding my body. For not fighting Colonel Phillips harder to keep looking. So much guilt for such a short life,” he murmurs, not noticing the look of pain that flashes across Tony’s face. 

Tony had never really stopped to think about how his Father might have felt about not finding Rogers in the ocean. He’d been too busy feeling jealous that Howard talked about him more than his own son. 

“And then he started laughing, though, I don’t really know why. It had to have caused him a lot of pain to do so. And he said that whoever had killed him had wasted their time. That the joke was on them, because he was just a failure. Just a tinkerer who invented a few useful things in his lifetime. He wouldn’t be the one that made history. History would eventually forget Howard Stark and he would be just a footnote in the books on Captain America. He said that.. He said that his son was the greatest thing he had ever created, and that he would be the one that changed the world.”

This time Bucky catches the wash of emotion across Tony’s face, and the bitterness that curves the corners of his mouth down.

“My Father said that, about me?” he asks flatly, as if not quite sure he really believes it. He had seen Howard’s tape, of course, where he told Tony that he can lead the way to the future, but, it's another thing to hear that he’d actually said it to a live human being.

Bucky stares at him steadily, sizing him up, head still cocked faintly to the right.

“He said you were the real future of Stark Industries, and that by the time they realized they had killed the wrong one it would be too late, because you would have already revolutionized the way the world thought about technology. He was proud of you, and he believed that you would make up for his shortcomings. That you would be a better inventor, and a better man, than he ever had been.”

He sits back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling to give Tony some semblance of privacy, unaware of the tears falling from his own eyes.

“And then he died. He reached out to take my hand and he said he was ready to go, now, and he died.”

The next part of the memory makes the vaguest smile quirk at the corner of his lips.

“I returned to the Hydra base I had been working out of and killed as many of them as I could because I knew him. I knew him. They had made me kill my friend and I _remembered_ who I was because I knew him. He was my friend. I killed him.”

The black hole in his chest seems to widen, threatening to swallow him whole. 

He hears Tony cough dryly from beside him and he slowly looks back down to meet his gaze, his eyes as red rimmed as Bucky’s felt and mouth set in a firm line. 

This was it, then. Tony was going to force him out of the Tower. Or worse, turn him over to Shield or the government to be locked away in a cage like the beast he was. 

“Was it your choice to kill him?”

Bucky’s brain stalls and his confusion must have shown on his face, because Tony sighs and runs a hand through his hair, which is still sticking up everywhere from when he had rushed to the lab straight from his nice warm bed.

He tries again.

“Was it your choice? Did you choose to murder my Father, knowingly, and of your own free will?”

Bucky sits up ramrod straight, his face white and on the verge of getting sick.

“No, I didn’t, I would- I would have never killed Howard by choice. They made me do it, they programmed me to be his killer. I never got a choice when it came to following their orders!”

His voice begs Tony to believe him, hands clenching on his lap and eyes wild. He would have never chosen to murder Howard any more than he's able to choose to kill Steve, once he began to remember who he is. 

“Then, why would I blame you for his death when it was Hydra’s doing?” Tony asks in a voice that is uncharacteristically gentle, reaching out to gingerly rest his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. 

Wet blue eyes look down at the fingers closed over the fabric of his t-shirt before trailing back up to the other man’s, struggling to understand how he doesn't hate the Soldier for what he had done.

“Because I was the thing that killed them. Their deaths are my fault,” he whispers, and Tony shakes his head.

“Listen, Barnes. Before I was the Iron Man, I made bombs. Big bombs, and missiles, that the army used to kill people. I never had any trouble sleeping because I convinced myself that they were only killing the bad guys. Except, one day I found out that those bombs were also being used by the bad guys, to kill the very same people I had designed them to protect. Quite literally. I had shrapnel from my own invention buried in my chest for years. And I watched my weapons kill a bunch of soldiers, most of them just kids, who were assigned to keep me safe. I watched them get blown away by _my_ tech.”

Bucky peers up at him through tear damp lashes, wondering where this was going. 

Tony shakes his head again and slumps down on his stool, burying his face in the palm of his hand.

“I guess, what I’m saying, Barnes, is that, if you blame yourself for what you were forced to do, against your will, then you have to blame me, too, for the deaths of all those soldiers and civilians that my weapons caused.”

Bucky hesitates, digesting, fingers fidgeting against one another on his lap.

“But you aren’t responsible for what your weapons did. You didn’t sell them to the bad guys, and you couldn’t control how they were used, or who they hurt,” he says slowly, the idea of what Tony is trying to get across starting to register. 

A nod this time, and Tony gives him a tired smile, reaching out to rest a hand over Bucky’s.

“And you’re not responsible for what Hydra made you do when they turned you into a weapon. You didn’t ask to be tortured, abused, and twisted into the Winter Soldier. Your files show a history of resisting what they did to you, even after years of torment and wipings. You couldn’t control how they used you, or who they forced you to hurt, no more than I could control how my weapons were used. The fact that you stayed with my Father so he didn’t have to die alone, and remembered enough of who you really were to go on a rampage afterwards that resulted in yet another bout in cryo? It tells me that, when you were capable of realizing what you were doing, you fought against what they made you become. You didn’t want to be the Winter Soldier. And so… I don’t blame you for the things you were forced to do when you became him. As far as I’m concerned, James Buchanan Barnes and the Winter Soldier are two completely different beings, and James shouldn’t be punished for the things the Winter Soldier did when he was wearing your skin.”

Bucky wants to burst into tears, but he knows once he starts he’ll be hard pressed to stop, and so he swallows down the emotions welling up inside him at the flat, open honesty with which Tony says these words.

Steve has always insisted he isn’t to blame for what the Soldier did. Natasha and Clint, too, and his therapist. Natasha and Clint know what it is like to become a monster against your will. To be twisted and used until you are more weapon than person, and you forget what it is like to really live. 

But to hear it from Tony, even when the man knows that Bucky’s hands are stained with the blood of his parents, is something else entirely.

The guilt isn’t gone. It will never really be totally gone, but, here is another person who is willing to help shoulder some of the load. Another friend who cares about him, and ses Bucky Barnes in the man across from him, not the shadow of the Winter Soldier.

He manages a small, watery smile, and lets Tony pull him up onto his feet.

“Thank you. And.. I’m sorry. For everything,” he murmurs, startling the other man when he presses himself against his chest, getting a tentative hug in return. 

“Yeah. I know you are. I forgive you,” Tony murmurs, patting him awkwardly on the head. Affection isn’t really his strong suit, but, Bucky seems to really need the human contact at that moment. 

“But next time, just talk to someone, first, before you cut up all my hard work.”

Bucky goes stiff, looking ashamed and embarrassed to remember what he’d been doing when Tony walked in. He pulls back to look at his arm, finding the split where he’d dragged the scalpel through the silicone flesh. It’s been very neatly glued back together, and at some point during the temporary patch job Tony must have turned back the settings of the sensors because he can't really feel any pain coming from the limb, anymore. 

His fingers are a bit rougher where he’d started to get choppier with his cutting, but, it’ll hold together for now until Tony makes a replacement silicone graft. 

“I just.. I didn’t think I deserved to look human. I was a weapon. I figured I should look like one,” he admits in a low voice, wanting to slink off into a corner and pretend he doesn't exist.

Tony’s face pinches and he sighs, patting the top of his head again.

“I understand. But there are better ways of working through stuff like that than hurting yourself. Trust me. The self-destructive path of punishment never works out.”

Bucky’s pretty sure there’s a story behind that, but, he’s cut off by Steve bursting into the lab, looking winded and anxious. He relaxes minutely when he sees Bucky is okay and no one and nothing seems to be hurt, starting to stride towards them.

Bucky looks up at Tony, quickly, with a desperate edge to his voice when he speaks.

“Please don’t tell Steve. I don’t want him to be upset, or blame himself for this,” he begs, heart thudding in his chest, terrified that Stark will rat him out.

But then Tony rolls his eyes and nods, waving his hand vaguely in Steve’s direction.

“Yeah, that does sound like something Captain Nobility would do, huh? Your secret is safe with me,” he says in a dramatic, but quiet tone, so that only Bucky can hear him. 

It gets a tired smile from the other man, and so Tony considers his attempt at humor a success, turning to go with a shrug of his shoulders.

“All yours, Rogers. Next time at least bring me some coffee if your boyfriend is going to wake me up before decent living hours,” he says cheerily, slamming the door of the lab behind him on his way out.

Steve grimaces and shakes his head as he reaches out to grip at Bucky’s shoulders, checking him over for any visible signs of injury or distress. He's still clearly quite rumpled from sleeping and the way his shirt is inside out seems to insinuate that Steve had been in too much of a rush to even notice or care as he jammed his clothing on.

The thought makes Bucky feel warm from head to toe and he leans forward so he can press his face into the soft green cotton, letting it soak up the lingering tears from his cheeks. It smells of sex and Steve’s cologne.

“That jackass didn’t do anything weird to you, did he?” Steve asks in a growl, sweeping his hands up and down Bucky’s back to check for even the slightest thing out of place, burying his nose in the top of Bucky’s head. 

The smaller man chuckles faintly and tips his head so that he can press his cheek against Steve’s chest, hearing the slowing thud of his heart as it returns to a normal rate.

“He isn’t so bad all the time. He actually has some pretty good ideas, now and then,” he murmurs, letting Steve grip under his thighs and hoist him up, wrapping his legs agreeably around his narrow waist. Steve carries him out of the lab this way and presumably heads back towards their bedroom, his hold on Bucky not wavering for an instant, even when he jabs at the button for the elevator.

“Now and then,” Steve agrees, though very grudgingly, nuzzling his face into Bucky’s throat when the other man circles his arms around his shoulders. 

They pass the rest of the elevator ride in comfortable silence, though Bucky can sense the questions burning on the tip of Steve’s tongue. He wants to ask about what happened, and why Bucky had been in Tony’s lab. He’s sure Steve will notice the rough edges of the silicone later, and he’ll have to come up with something to explain it away, but, for right now, he doesn’t really want to do anything that requires much talking.

“I want to have sex again,” he sighs as Steve fumbles to get the door of their apartment open, pleased when this elicits a surprised, but very agreeable noise from the man holding him up. 

“Yeah, Buck?” Steve asks, sounding a little breathless as he carries him through the apartment and into their bedroom.

“Yeah.”

He wanted to wash the taste of the Winter Soldier’s poison from his mouth and his mind. He wanted a second chance at waking up in Steve’s arms, but this time slowly, at his own pace, with the opportunity to enjoy the feeling of skin on skin, and the soft sounds of Steve breathing as he slept. 

He wants to remember what it feels like to he wrapped up in Steve again, until the rest of the world falls away and he can't think about anything else except _Steve._

Steve lays him back on the bed like he's something fragile and worth protecting, and Bucky stares up at him with an ache in his chest, giving the other man a brief moment to look him over before pulling him down on top, legs spread to allow him in close. 

Strong hands easily remove their haphazard clothing, and Bucky isn’t really sure how because he doesn’t remember moving his mouth away from Steve’s long enough for shirts to be pulled up and over their heads, but, soon enough Steve is naked on top of him once more, lighting a fire beneath his skin as he traces his mouth down his throat. 

“Steve, please. I want you in,” he whines, hitching his knees against Steve’s hips to try and guide him where he wants him, groping blindly over his head for the bottle of lube they’d tossed there the night before. 

Steve’s mouth stutters against his pulse when he realizes what it is that Bucky is asking for, drawing back to stare at him and looking utterly wrecked at the idea. 

“You sure?” he practically whimpers, accepting the bottle of lubricant with fumbling fingers, clearly nervous, now, despite his bravado earlier. He’d had sex with other men before, yes, but this is _Bucky_. He's more important than anyone else could ever be. 

Bucky is the opposite of Steve in that moment, pleasantly loose limbed and smiling contentedly up at the nervous man, drawing his knees up to his chest so he can further enunciate exactly what he’s asking for. 

“Please. I want to feel you inside me, Steve.” 

He wants to feel good again. He wants to wash away the stain those memories have left on his skin and let himself drown in Steve. 

He will have to talk to his therapist about the things he remembered. 

But right now, no one can fault him for wanting to do something that makes him happy. 

_“Please.”_

Steve doesn’t need any more persuading than that, and he trails hot kisses down the length of Bucky’s stomach so he can mouth at his cock, slick fingers brushing in teasing circles against the twitching pucker of his entrance. He lets Steve indulge in this for a couple minutes, because it does feel incredible, even if it isn’t exactly what he wants, but when it gets to be too much he’s quick to sink his left hand in Steve’s hair and give a warning tug, lifting his hips to try and bear down on the fingertip against his hole. 

And Steve is smirking around his cock, the smug bastard, and just when Bucky is about to cuff him upside the head, he sinks his finger in up to the first knuckle, dragging a low, ragged moan from the man beneath him. It feels odd at first. Not particularly good, and certainly not painful. Just a steady pressure against his insides. 

That is, until Steve’s mouth slides down to tongue at where his finger is pressed inside Bucky’s body, and Bucky’s sure he actually sees stars. 

“Holy fucking hell,” he croaks, letting Steve hook his knees over his shoulders so he can bury his face deeper between his thighs, alternating between stabbing his tongue against and suckling at the twitching rim as he slides his finger in and out of Bucky, teasing with the tip of the second before letting it pop in alongside the first. 

Steve’s fingers feel thick and heavy inside him, especially when he starts to scissor them apart to spread him open even more, and there’s the filthy sound of Steve spitting - he can feel it against his entrance - saliva and lube leaking down the cleft of his ass and making a mess of the bed. 

And then Steve’s angling his jaw up between his fingers, spread apart to keep his hole open, and fucks his tongue into the wet heat, and Bucky’s completely done for. 

He’s sobbing with pleasure as the thick muscle stabs inside him over and over, arching up off the bed and nearly cracking Steve in the nose with his pelvis as he grinds against his mouth, shuddering when a third finger is pressing in alongside the other two. He’s sure there’s supposed to be pain or discomfort, but Bucky is so distracted by the feeling of Steve’s mouth eating him out that he can’t even focus on the sensations those clever digits are causing, his own hands buried in Steve’s mop of blond hair. 

Steve's fingers curl inside of Bucky, searching, and he’s just about to beg to be fucked when they find what they’re looking for. 

Bucky comes with such force that he almost throws them both off the end of the bed, howling out his pleasure and clenching down hard around the fingers mercilessly rubbing against his prostate, sending him to new highs with each spurt of come across his belly. 

Only when his body goes boneless does Steve finally remove his fingers, and Bucky whimpers when his dick gives a valiant twitch at the sight of him sitting up from between his thighs, his mouth and chin shiny-wet with lube and spit. Steve grins and curls over him so he can clean up the mess of white Bucky has made of himself, looking positively sinful with his big baby blues and long eyelashes as he licks away the streaks of come. 

Bucky can taste himself on his tongue when he finally kisses him again, spreading his legs so Steve can fit himself comfortably between them. He still hasn’t forgotten his mission of getting the other man inside him, however, and once he feels suitably recovered from his intense orgasm he breaks the kiss to reach down between them and find Steve’s cock, guiding the tip to press against his entrance. 

“Please. I want you inside me,” he says for the hundredth time that night, groaning when Steve crushes their mouths together once more and licks his way between Bucky’s lips, rocking his hips forward so that the head of his cock pushes inside his body, hot and tight and welcoming. 

It’s definitely way bigger than three fingers and Bucky moans around Steve’s tongue, fingernails digging into the meat of his shoulders. There’s a dull throb of discomfort, but, Steve had been very thorough with his stretching, and there is definitely plenty of slick to ease the way. Bucky’s body arches up as Steve sinks in to the hilt, going still to allow the man beneath him to adjust to the considerable intrusion. 

Bucky could tell it's taking every ounce of willpower Steve has left not to move, and he pulls him down for another desperate, brutal kiss, feeling beads of sweat slipping down the back of his neck. 

Only when Bucky tugs on his hair to let him know he can move does Steve finally start rocking his hips against him, grabbing at Bucky’s thighs so he can wrap them around his waist. Bucky can feel his toes curling against the skin of Steve's lower back as the low burn transforms into pleasure, his cock already starting to fill once more. 

He’d been expecting a quick, desperate fuck, considering they've been denying themselves this for decades, but, Steve is slow and gentle with his movements, his lips pressed to Bucky’s and hands roaming down his sides, stroking. 

This is definitely not fucking by any stretch of the imagination. It's making love, and the instant that thought crosses Bucky’s mind he whimpers, clenching his body down around Steve’s cock inside him. 

“Feels good, Steve.. Steve..!” he gasps hoarsely, one arm locking around the bigger man’s shoulders to keep them pressed chest to chest while his free hand remains tangled in his hair, following his movements as Steve mouths his way to his neck and finds the sensitive pulse point behind his ear. 

Steve’s hips drive a little faster, now, between his thighs, and Bucky relishes the lewd sound of wet flesh on flesh as their bodies move together, Steve’s cock pressing deeper and deeper inside him with every buck of his hips. 

But it’s still not quite where Bucky wants it, and he whines, shoving at Steve until the man has to roll over onto his back, cock slipping free. 

That is definitely the opposite of what Bucky wants, and it takes only a second for him to scramble his way up to straddle Steve’s hips, holding his cock steady so he can sink back down onto it. 

Steve looks blown away, but pleased, to see Bucky taking the lead, and he makes no attempt to move him when he rests his hands over his hips, thumbs dipping into the hollows above the bone. 

It takes a couple testing movements to find the angle Bucky wants, but the second he feels a sharp stab of pleasure in his guts he knows that he’s got a winner, immediately starting to fuck himself down on Steve’s cock. Each time he sinks down on the hardened flesh it rubs right past that spot inside him that had felt so fantastic earlier, and he moans out his appreciation, hands planted on Steve’s broad chest so he can leverage himself back onto his cock 

It's a bit like riding a horse or a motorcycle but _infinitely_ better and Bucky speeds up the movement of his body as the prickling of pleasure starts to crest into a familiar pattern, his breath coming in staggered gasps. 

Steve looks positively destroyed beneath him, his eyes blown wide with lust and mouth red and swollen, staring up at Bucky like he wants to memorize this moment. 

Bucky knows what that expression means. Steve is filing this snapshot away in his near photographic memory so he can draw it later. He wonders what he looks like, his thighs spread obscenely wide over Steve’s hips and Steve’s cock buried inside him, their muscles straining and skin wet with sweat and lube. 

Maybe they should get a mirror for the bedroom. 

“Buck, m’gonna…” Steve groans, his body going taut as a bowstring as he comes, hard, inside of Bucky, flooding him with heat and wetness as he continues to fuck down on him. He's still chasing his own orgasm, and he rides Steve’s cock until it starts to go soft inside him, lifting himself just enough so that it can slip out before he’s replacing it with four of his own fingers from his right hand. 

“Jesus Christ, Bucky,” Steve is swearing from somewhere underneath him, his hands tightening their grip on Bucky’s waist as he watches him fuck himself on his own fingers, the way eased by the copious amounts of come and slick inside him. 

“Steeeeeeeve…” Bucky whines, his cock bobbing purplish and neglected between his thighs as he rides his fingers, eyes blowing wide when they find his prostate once more, “SteveSteveSteveSteveSteve-!” 

He comes, dick untouched, with a throaty shout and rolls his hips as a few weak spurts of come escape his tired body, grinding himself down onto his fingers for as long as his frazzled nerves can take it before finally collapsing down on top of Steve’s chest, boneless, limp and definitely not about to move anytime in the near future. 

He feels a pleasant ache in his ass and hips, his hole clenching around the sudden emptiness, wanting already to be filled again. 

Maybe after they sleep some more. And eat. Eating is probably a good idea. 

Steve is nuzzling kisses along his hairline, his hands rubbing soothingly up and down his back, mouthing gentle words of love against his sweaty skin. Bucky can’t focus on anything in that moment except Steve’s touch, feeling blissfully blank and smoothed over. 

This feeling is something Bucky can hold onto. Something he can embrace and enjoy, even when it seems like all there is in the world is the Winter Soldier and the pain he has caused. 

Here there's just him and Steve. Just _Bucky_ and Steve, and their bed, and the smell of sex and the taste of his skin when he lazily darts his tongue out to lick away a droplet of sweat from his neck. 

There was something about Steve Rogers that made it easier to forget the pain of his past and just... focus on the here and the now. 

And right now he's being shifted onto his side so Steve can curl his body around him, his chest warm and sticky against Bucky’s back. Steve’s lips find his neck and his arms wrap comfortably around his waist, keeping him close. It's the same way they had been curled together this morning, but, this time Bucky is able to let himself enjoy it. He can feel the soft puffs of Steve’s breathing against his skin, and the gentle way his fingers trace vague shapes on his belly. 

More than ever before, Bucky wants to stay with this man. 

There is no Winter Soldier, not anymore. There is just Bucky Barnes. 

And he is going to make sure it stays that way, no matter what it takes. 


	7. I've Come Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peel the scars from off my back, I don't need them anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and Summary from ["Welcome Home"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X9oMfiwdHo) by Radical Face.
> 
> So this was supposed to just be a bit of fluff and sex prefacing a giant angst bucket of a chapter, and then things sort of happened and now you get almost an entire chapter of just fluff and sex. There's also an important talk at the end, that both of them needed to have, I'd say.

Bucky wakes up slowly, the sun bright against his eyelids and shining warm across his back as he sighs into the pillow, not quite willing to surrender to the idea of being conscious. The sheets still smell of sex and the memory of earlier that morning brings a drowsy smile to his lips as he finally lets his eyes shutter open, squinting against the light to see where Steve is.

It takes a second to realize he’s alone in the bed, but, his gaze is drawn upwards to see Steve sitting by the window, wearing only his boxers, with his sketchpad on his lap, brow furrowed and a pencil between his teeth as he studies whatever it is he's working on. 

“Couldn’t sleep, anymore, soldier boy?” Bucky asks in a low, gravelly voice, pleased when this startles the other man from his intense staring match with the paper. His eyes are still hooded with sleep and his left arm is curled comfortably under his cheek, the other resting up by his face. He can feel the blankets pooling just below the curve of his ass, and with the sun shining across his back, he’s sure he makes a pretty enticing picture, all things considered.

A smile spreads across Steve’s lips, warm and happy, and he removes the pencil from his mouth so he can speak with some level of intelligibility. 

“I had an itch that wouldn’t let me rest until it was scratched,” he admits, cocking his head to the side and studying Bucky.

“Stay like that for a little bit.”

Bucky chuckles and lets his eyes droop shut again, more than happy to lay in the sun for however long Steve wants him to. 

“If you wanted me to model nude for you, Stevie, all you had to do was ask. I won’t even make you take me out to dinner, first,” he hums, earning a snort of laughter from across the room. After that, though, Steve is all business, and Bucky lets him do his thing. He knows better than to interrupt the other man when he's onto something, and the bed really is quite comfortable. 

Every once in a while he peeks his eyes open to watch Steve, letting his gaze linger on the faint furrow of concentration between his brows, and the way his lower lip disappears between his teeth when he's struggling to get something just _right._ Bucky slips into a light doze while Steve works, content to keep his body positioned, loose and relaxed, just the way he wants. This is child’s play compared to the hours he’d had to sit in uncomfortable, or even painful, positions when staking out a target. 

Only when Steve’s hand brushes through the mess of his hair does he finally allow himself to stir and roll over onto his back, humming lazily as he reaches up to pull the blond down into the bed with him. 

“I wanna see it,” he asks in a voice still heavy with sleep, grinning at the way Steve blushes and looks down and away. He’d always been so shy about showing anyone his drawings, even Bucky, but he obligingly hands over the sketchpad for Bucky’s perusal.

Any amusement he was feeling fades, though, at the picture of himself etched into the paper in front of him. An obvious amount of detail and affection was in every single line, and Bucky carefully traces his finger around the shape of his own face, relaxed and peaceful in sleep. 

“This is how you see me?” he murmurs, drinking in how… _human_ he looks. How normal.

Steve’s smiling gently, and he takes the drawing pad from Bucky so he can flip a few pages back, handing it to the dark haired man again.

“This is how I’ve always seen you, Buck.”

It’s a drawing of him from his first morning at Stark Tower. He’s wearing one of Steve’s too tight t-shirts with his hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, face scruffy, bruised, and scratched, seated at the breakfast table with one leg curled under him and the other drawn up with his knee under his chin, arms wrapped around the limb like it's a shield. On the table in front of him is a bowl of fruit loops, and Bucky himself is wearing an expression of comical displeasure, nose wrinkled and brow furrowed. 

It looks so incredibly normal. _He_ look so incredibly normal. Like he's a real person, and not a weapon. He had been a weapon then. He had been the Soldier, but even the Soldier doesn't look all that threatening with a mild look of horror on his face at the meal he’s been provided and a ponytail. 

He flips through the other pages, his heart clenching and throat growing tight at the care that went into every single one.

A sketch of him on the couch with Clint, his tongue poking out and a game controller in his hands as he clearly kicks the other man’s ass, to judge by the look of dismay and despair that Clint wears in the picture. 

Bucky out cold with his cheek on Natasha’s thigh, one arm curled against his chest and the other slung across her knee while she reads from his copy of _The Fellowship of the Ring_.

Sam Wilson in the middle of laughing at something Bruce had said, his head thrown back and one arm folded across his belly, Bruce grinning wryly with his glasses perched on his head.

Thor wearing an expression much like a puppy getting a lecture as Jane Foster gestures incredulously at something off the side of the page. Bucky remembers this moment. She had been yelling at him for eating the rest of the lasagna she had clearly labeled as being for Bucky when he got out of his therapy. She’d made Thor go to Bucky’s favorite bakery for fresh bread and pastries after he apologized for not noticing something called a sticky note. 

There's even a drawing of Tony, dozing in their armchair after spending the afternoon looking after Bucky, and Pepper with an expression of fond exasperation in the middle of draping a blanket across him. 

Bucky flips to the next page and his breath catches, eyes raking over a drawing of himself from before the war. He's wearing a stained, ratty sweater and covered in filth from a long day down at the docks, hair sticking up in every direction and a grin on his face so wide that it nearly split it in half. He has a package tucked under his arm, wrapped up in old newspaper and tied with string from the butcher’s.

“I remember this,” he admits in a quiet voice, studying the faint roundness of baby fat clinging to his cheeks and the contradictory way his collarbones jut out from the droopy, holey sweater. He’d skipped lunch at work for weeks, and picked up extra shifts, just so he could scrape together enough pennies to get Steve the thing he’d wanted most for Christmas that year. 

“You nearly worked yourself to death, you smug jerk,” Steve chastises, but there's no real bite to his words as he slides down on the bed to lay opposite Bucky, hand slipping quietly over the other man’s on top of his drawing.

That gets a grin out of the former assassin, and he makes some pretense of looking slightly guilty, shrugging his shoulders.

“You just wanted those pencils so bad I couldn’t help myself, Stevie. I had to get them.”

They had been walking by the art shop on their way to the grocery, Steve stopping to pine after the pencil and charcoal drawing kit displayed proudly in the window, boasting the widest array of textures and densities of any kit of its kind. It even came with its own erasers, sharpener, and a beautiful leather carrying case to store it all in. The price is offensively high for a luxury item like that in the middle of the Depression. 

But Steve wants it. Bucky knows he sometimes takes the long way home just so he can look at it.

So he scrimped and he saved and he worked. He picked up another job on the side without telling Steve, throwing concrete slabs at a construction site in the city.

It was worth it for the way Steve’s face had lit up when he opened the package, and the tears in his eyes when he realized the things Bucky must have done to make this happen for him. 

“It’s the greatest gift anyone has ever given me, Buck. I cherished it,” Steve murmurs, scooching his head across the pillows so they were nose to nose, his expression warm with affection and gaze soft. 

“But mostly I cherished that it was you who gave it to me.”

Bucky’s heart lurches in his chest and he’s more than happy that Steve closes the distance between them, lips brushing gently against his own. 

They kiss slow and sweet, and Bucky makes sure to move the drawing pad to the table beside their bed before slipping himself the rest of the way against Steve, fingers finding their way into dark golden strands. 

When the ache in his belly gets to be too much, Bucky swipes his tongue across the seam of Steve’s mouth to beg for entrance, moaning at the eager way it opens to allow him inside to explore. He can taste the cup of coffee Steve must have had before working on his drawing, sweet with sugar and that pumpkin pie creamer Natasha had gotten for them. Bucky doesn't really care for the creamer in his own coffee, but somehow it tastes perfectly wonderful when he's sucking the flavor of it from Steve’s tongue. 

Steve’s boxers disappear from between them and Bucky sighs when he can finally grind his hips against the other man’s without a barrier, shuddering at the delicious friction of their cocks sliding against one another. 

“How do you want to do this, Bucky?” Steve asks, and Bucky enjoys the way his voice catches when the dark haired man rubs a callused thumb across his nipple, teasing the pink bud.

“Want you in me, again,” he sighs, and his head tips back with a low, agreeable whine as Steve dips down to bite at his throat, tongue soothing away the sting of the mark he leaves there. 

“Show me how you want it,” Steve is purring somewhere around his collarbone, and Bucky grumbles something about playing dirty when that devious mouth ghosts down to suckle at his nipple. 

He wonders if they would have had this much sex before the war, if Bucky hadn’t always been working to pay for their rent and food, and Steve’s medical bills. If things had been different, and they could have been together without being afraid, without feeling the need to hide behind lies of just being very close friends to protect themselves from the rest of the world.

They missed out on a lot of things that should have been. 

“Like.. Like this.”

He detaches Steve’s lips from their current task of trying to make him come just from tormenting his chest and carefully rolls over onto his side so that his back is to the other man, reaching back to pull Steve by the hip until they’re flush together. They won't be able to move much in this position, but, Bucky likes the intimacy of it. He can feel Steve’s heart beating against his back, and enjoys the way his arms curl around Bucky like he's never going to let him go. 

Steve’s mouth curves into a smile against the back of Bucky’s neck, and he can hear the slick sounds of lube over fingers before a hand is sliding between them, rubbing against his entrance to coax it into relaxing. He's still a little loose and wet from sex a few hours before and he sighs comfortably at the careful way Steve opens him back up again. 

“I think I might have a thing for your fingers in me,” Bucky admits in a low voice, shivering when Steve's middle finger grazes against his prostate, promising good things to come.

There’s a wicked upturn to Steve’s smile, and Bucky only gets a brief moment of chill against his back when the other man shifts onto his knees before a strong arm is suddenly curving under his hips to hoist him ass up into the air, leaving him with his forearms against the bed to keep his face from pushing straight into the mattress.

“Steve, what the f-“

Bucky doesn’t get to finish that sentence, not then or ever, because Steve’s shoving his thick thumb deep into his hole and has buried his face between the mounds of his rear so he can lick at the puckered flesh, and who knew Captain America had such a _thing_ for eating ass. 

“Jesus holy fucking mother of God,” Bucky swears into the pillows, biting at the soft cotton pillowcase as Steve growls against his rim, sending pleasurable vibrations straight to his dick. He never realized that getting manhandled can be quite enjoyable, it isn’t really ever something just anyone can do, and Steve’s arm isn’t even trembling despite the fact it's supporting virtually all of Bucky’s weight, just so he could have him ass up in the air for his own enjoyment.

“Don’t say that too loudly or Sister Marie will come back to haunt you with her ruler,” Steve chuckles, and Bucky swears he'll get revenge on whoever thought it's even _fair_ to let him sound so deliciously fucked out and rough just from burying his tongue in Bucky’s ass. 

“I’ll say whatever I God damn please when Captain fucking America is eating me out like it’s his job, you smug little punk,” Bucky snarls, dick bobbing hard and ruddy red with blood against his belly. He yelps and nearly throws himself head first into the headboard when Steve yanks his thumb out from inside him, about to whine at the unpleasant emptiness when three of his fingers push back in its place, nailing his prostate on the first try. 

Any attempts at conversation made after that are swallowed by Bucky’s rough moaning, and the painfully arousing, wet sounds of Steve’s mouth against his hole, tugging at the rim with the tip and carefully grazing his teeth against the sensitive flesh. 

Bucky tips his head so he can see through his hair at the sight of Steve’s face buried against his ass, eyes closed and brow furrowed with concentration. Steve Rogers apparently approaches eating ass with the same focus and determination that he has when fighting against Hydra. 

Just when he’s about to come with the force of an F5 tornado, Steve’s fingers are withdrawing again, and Bucky’s pretty sure that in at least three states this is definitely enough for him to file a self-defense plea against murder charges.

“Steve, _please_ ,” he begs in a low whine, shoving at the bed to try and push his ass back towards Steve’s retreating mouth. He's so close he can taste it. 

Steve’s chuckling, and Bucky’s about to start formulating that self-defense claim when he’s lowered back onto the mattress and Steve’s sliding up behind him, again, cock heavy and hot against the cleft of his ass.

“I thought you wanted me inside you,” he’s teasing, and Bucky can’t really think of a witty comeback because that devilish mouth is sucking at the spot behind his ear that makes him go weak in the knees, fingers clawing at the hopeless, tangled mess of sheets that their bed had become.

“Please. _Please_ ,” is all he can say, and Steve takes that as a yes, lining up his cock and slowly beginning to rock his way into the man curled up beside him. A low, contented sigh escapes Bucky’s lips when he’s buried all the way inside and he reaches back to cup his left hand against Steve’s hip, head tipping back against the other man’s. He’s a thick, burning heat filling Bucky up from the inside, and he can feel the warmth spreading to the rest of his body.

Steve’s arms circle across him, one curling under him to wrap around his shoulders and the other draping over his side, pausing only until Bucky nods before using his hand against his belly to guide his body backwards, gently rocking them together in lieu of thrusting inside of him. 

He likes sex this way the best, he decides, because it means Steve stays buried in his body. It feels wonderful when he plunges back inside after withdrawing, but, Bucky likes it like this more. 

It makes him feel whole again, like a missing puzzle piece finally clicking into place. 

He’d never really seen sex in this way before. It’d always been nice, sleeping with a woman, and it certainly felt good, but, he’d never really seen it as being anything more than what it was: just sex. 

Sex with Steve is different. 

Everything with Steve is different. Better. More. 

At least, it is for Bucky.

It's a wordless connection to the man he loves more than life itself. To the person who pulls him back from the brink of self-destruction more times than he can ever count.

“Steve,” he sighs, and he turns his head so he can find the other man’s mouth in a clumsy kiss, not balking at the taste of himself on his tongue as their bodies rock together. It feels like a mark of ownership for Bucky, similar to the way Steve enjoys seeing the lovemarks dotting Bucky’s neck and throat. 

He feels Steve mouth his name against the corner of his lips before he kisses him again, the hand on his belly slipping down to grasp at his cock. It only takes three slow, gliding tugs before Bucky is coming, squeezing down around Steve’s cock inside him. Steve’s fingers catch the spurts of come his body manages, his hips still rocking against Bucky’s ass, and before the other man can so much as blink, Bucky’s pulling that hand up to lick it clean, tongue sliding slick and hot against his palm to catch every spot and smear of white fluid. 

Steve groans into Bucky’s hair, shivering when Bucky sucks his fingers between his lips, teeth scraping against the sensitive pads of his fingertips. He has no problem with being very vocal while he’s sucking, making as many lewd noises as possible as he swallows around the digits in his mouth, clenching the muscles of his ass down on Steve’s cock. 

Steve orgasms so hard Bucky’s convinced he’s full with come up to his stomach, grinning wickedly around the fingers he had just been tormenting. He can feel the jerky, aborted thrusts against his back as Steve rides the waves of pleasure washing over him and each pulse is hot and sticky inside his body. Steve’s softening cock slips out from inside him, and the emptiness leaves Bucky wanting despite coming multiple times in the last several hours.

“Two can play that game,” Steve is hissing breathlessly, and Bucky finds himself face first in the pillows once more, Steve’s thumbs prying his ass open so he can admire him, making the dark haired man flush under the intense scrutiny.

“Your hole is twitching, Buck. You’re so loose and sloppy you can’t even hold my come inside you,” Steve is humming lightly, and Bucky wants to kick him in the face because how dare he say something so deliciously filthy and hot while looking so God damned proud of himself. 

“Maybe you should clean me up, so I don’t make a mess of our bed,” Bucky is suggesting in a breathless tone, and they both choose to ignore the fact that their bed is definitely a lost cause at this point.

Steve purses his lips thoughtfully, swiping the pad of his thumb over Bucky’s hole as if he actually has to think about it, rotating the digit in a teasing circle against his rim. 

“I suppose I probably should. I am the one that made a mess of you,” he says agreeably, and Bucky is pretty sure the way Steve’s face looks when it’s filled with hunger and lust is illegal in at least fifteen countries.

“Yes, you are,” Bucky whimpers, spreading his knees as wide as they can go in a not so subtle invitation to the other man, “So take responsibility and clean me up.”

Steve doesn’t need much more persuading than that, and Bucky nearly chokes on a moan when there are thumbs prying his ass open. He can feel the come and lube leaking from his fucked out hole, now, and Steve cleans it all away with a neat swipe of his tongue from his balls to the top of his ass, smacking his lips just loud enough to drive Bucky insane. 

He doesn’t press any fingers inside the man beneath him just yet, save the barest press of his thumbs against the rim to spread him open. The only thing that pushes inside of Bucky is Steve’s tongue, and it’s easy for him to fuck the muscle deep into the pliant body beneath him, now, lapping at his own come like it's honey. Heat curls in Bucky’s belly but his cock remains soft between his thighs, so he ignores it in favor of focusing on the way the tip of Steve’s tongue drags against his inner walls, flicking out to torment the sensitive, red rim. 

Even when every drop of come has been cleaned out of him, Steve continues to fuck him deep with his tongue, finally slipping a single finger in alongside the wet muscle with the sole mission of finding his prostate. 

Bucky is sure Steve’s jaw must be aching fiercely at this point, but if it does he doesn’t so much as slow down a beat when the man beneath him moans and bucks his hips as he rubs against his prostate, stimulating it with a continuous, gentle rolling motion. 

Bucky doesn’t expect to get a second (or fourth? he can’t even remember anymore) orgasm, with his cock still hanging soft between his legs, but, his body continues to surprise him when, after Steve withdraws his tongue just enough that he can gently bump his teeth against the rim of Bucky’s hole, his muscles are spasming and he’s coming in two weak spurts on the sheets, ass clenching around the finger inside him.

It’s a lower burn than his last orgasm, more of a smolder than anything else, but it rolls through him like a slow wave, leaving him completely, and utterly blissed out. 

Steve continues to rub against his prostate to prolong the aching pleasure until Bucky finally gestures that he’s had enough, sinking all the way down onto the bed and groaning into the pillows.

He’s never felt so delightfully fucked out and at ease in his entire life.

“You sure you didn’t get reincarnated as some kind of sex God?” he mumbles incoherently, allowing Steve to roll him over onto his back and pick him up without a single complaint. He's definitely not about to walk anywhere, and certainly not towards the bathroom where he's being carried. His entire body feels like it's boneless and devoid of any muscle or strength, and if Steve is willing to do all the work he certainly isn’t about to stop him.

He can feel the rumbling of Steve’s laughter against his side and he presses into it, soaking up the soothing ease of the sound. Steve’s laughter used to be accompanied by a cough or wheezing back before the war. His lungs are much stronger now. 

“Do you ever miss it?” Bucky asks quietly, sitting perched on the edge of the tub where Steve had left him so he can fill the bath with hot water, turning to look at him with a steady gaze. Steve doesn’t have to ask him what he means. Bucky knows Steve often wonders the same thing.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for how much simpler things were, I suppose, before the war happened. You worked hard and you did your best to live a good life before you died. It’s a lot harder to get by, these days. We’d be working three jobs each just to afford an apartment in Brooklyn, now. You can’t really get any decent work, without putting yourself into debt just to get an education that you can only hope might get you somewhere,” Steve admits, watching the water slowly creep up the edge of the tub. 

Bucky nods, accepting this, his hands folded together on his lap and his expression subdued. Things are a lot different, now, than he remembers, though unlike Steve he did get some glimpses at how life transitioned from the forties to now, when he's taken out of cryo for a mission. He can imagine the shock Steve must have felt at waking up to a foreign world.

“But, at the same time, I’m kind of happy that this is how things worked out. It’s easier to get a good education, no matter who you are, even if it can be expensive sometimes. Technology has made a lot of things easier, and people live longer, now, and live better, because of how far medicine has come. The world is a lot more tolerant than it used to be, too,” Steve adds with a thoughtful noise, turning off the water and waiting for Bucky to climb into the tub before sliding in behind him, letting the tired man lay back against his chest.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, and there’s still a lot of isms and phobias, but, it isn’t so… accepted and encouraged, anymore, to be a bigot. If you murder a gay man because he’s gay, you can even get charged with an additional crime, I’ve learned. And women can actually move up in the world. The system isn’t perfect, and there’s still a lot of problems, and people fall through the cracks, but, it’s getting better.”

Bucky nods again, twining his fingers absently over Steve’s as he soaks in the heat of the bath, letting it soothe away the ache from what's basically been an entire morning of sex. 

“Like when we could hold hands yesterday at breakfast, and the waitress didn’t ask us to leave, or condemn us as the underbelly of society,” he murmurs, thumb rubbing in circles over Steve’s skin. If Bucky had held Steve’s hand like that in 1941 they would have been chased out of the diner by a mob, and probably beaten to death in some back alley. No one would care to stop or punish people who were just taking out the trash. 

“Yeah, like that, Buck,” Steve hums, resting his chin on the top of Bucky’s head and breathing in the steam, letting a comfortable silence settle over the bath. He can't really speak personally as to how things have changed for other people in modern day America. But things seem to be better for everyone, or, at least, not as blatantly terrible as they once were. There's some form of social accountability.

“But my favorite thing about being around to see the twenty first century is that I found you, again,” he says, voice so quiet that Bucky only just barely catches it. Bucky looks down at the twisted scars on his shoulder where skin meets prosthetic, and the patches of pale flesh that marked old bullet holes and stab wounds. He doesn’t feel like something worth the loss of seventy odd years of getting to live. 

“How would you miss what you didn’t know was there to be had in the first place?” he sighs, and Steve’s arms tighten around him, holding him tight against his chest like he's afraid Bucky's about to disappear forever. 

“I’ve missed you every single waking moment of my life since the day you fell from that train,” Steve confesses in a quiet voice, and Bucky wants to run from the room. Anything to escape the grief gnawing at his heart. 

“I missed you, too, Steve.”

Bucky closes his eyes and tips his head back against Steve’s shoulder, leaning into the warm mouth that presses gentle kisses all over his face and in his hair. 

“Just before every new bout of cryo, I would start to remember things. They would catch me scratching your name into the dirt, or humming that atrocious Star Spangled Man song from your show, that you had us all memorize so we could sing it and drive our captors nuts if we were being interrogated… They’d try to wipe me, again and again they would wipe me, and it would only take a few days, a week at most before your face would start crowding into my mind. Your voice, on repeat, like a record just skipping, just… skipping.”

Bucky feels Steve’s fingers sliding down his prosthetic arm, trailing over the seam that had been cut there hours before. Steve’s vision is better than perfect. Bucky knew he would notice the first chance he got a good look at him.

“What happened this morning, Buck? Why were you in Tony’s lab?” he asks gently, curling his hand over Bucky’s and letting their fingers slot together. He doesn’t push Bucky to answer, pressing patient kisses to the shell of his ear while the former assassin tries to figure out what to say, staring vaguely at the bath water in front of him. 

“I had a nightmare. About… About killing Howard and Maria Stark,” he croaks finally, and the way Steve remains perfectly still makes Bucky aware that he’d expected as much, but had been waiting for Bucky to feel up to saying the words himself. 

“I had forgotten, until now. The… the wiping and the cryo would make previous missions feel foggy and far away. Like the memories weren’t really mine. The older they were, the foggier they got. But now that I’m healing and not… being wiped, all those memories are flooding back in.”

He pulls his hands from Steve’s and looks at them. He wonders if Steve can see the river of blood staining the skin. The weight of the lives he had taken, that had been taken etched into every line. Stark is a master at what he does. Even his prosthetic hand had lines and whorls and creases, making it look real. Making it look _human._

“I wanted to cut it off so there was only metal, again, because I’m a monster, and.. Monsters should look like monsters. I don’t deserve to look like a person.”

Steve covers his palms with his own and draws them up to his lips, lingering there before dropping a kiss on the top of Bucky’s head. 

“You can talk to me when you remember things, Bucky. I won’t judge you for what they made you do. I just want to help you get better, and if talking about your nightmares helps, then, I want you to wake me up and tell me about it, even if it’s two in the morning and you don’t want to disturb me,” Steve says gently, squeezing Bucky’s hands in his own. 

Bucky’s heart hurts so much he thinks it might actually burst from his chest, and he can’t help but hunch away from Steve, hoping that the other man can’t hear the plop of his tears in the bath water.

“Why won’t any of you just hate me? I’m the monster that parents tell their children about to keep them from wandering too far. I’m a murderer. I killed people whose only crime was trying to make the world a better place. I killed _kids_ without blinking. I’m not worth saving,” he hisses, pulling his hands from Steve and wrapping his arms around himself, curling into a ball of self-loathing and disgust. 

Steve doesn’t push for contact. He remains seated in the tub, carefully still, with his arms resting at his sides. 

“What did Stark say, when you told him that you were the one to kill his parents?” Steve inquires, looking up at the ceiling to give Bucky some semblance of privacy, so the man doesn't feel cornered or pinned down by the question.

Bucky goes still, shifting on the balls of his feet and making the water sway back and forth slightly. 

“He said he didn’t blame me, because Hydra forced me to do it against my will. That he can’t blame me because I was a.. I was their prisoner, and a victim of Hydra, too. That, if I was guilty of what I did, then he was guilty of killing the innocent people his bombs were used against without his consent, too,” he says finally, after several long minutes of silence. 

Steve smiles despite himself, wondering why Tony acts like such an entitled jerkoff all the time when he's clearly capable of being a pretty good person when he wants to. 

“He’s right. You’ve been through Hell at Hydra’s hands, and you overcame it time and time again. You’re a strong person, Bucky, and a good man. You never would have chosen to hurt anyone who was innocent. You are not defined by what things you did against your will, but by the things you _choose_ to do. The Winter Soldier isn’t who you are. It never was.”

Bucky runs his fingers through his hair and looks over his shoulder at Steve, who is sitting patiently, waiting for him to come back if he chooses to. Steve, who has just signed himself up for many sleepless nights with a smile and not a single sign of regret. Steve, who has never pushed Bucky more than he needs to be pushed, and has been patiently waiting for him to come out of his shell all these long months.

Steve, who loves him after decades of being apart, and sees through the scars and the damaged, crumbling outer wall of the Winter Soldier, to the Bucky Barnes trying to claw his way out from beneath the rubble.

Steve, who is holding out his hand, now, offering to help dig him out from beneath the destruction of everything he’d come to accept as fact in the last seventy years.

“I’ll catch you this time, Buck,” he whispers, a promise in his gaze, and Bucky remembers a frozen Russian landscape flashing by, and the desperation in Steve’s face as he realizes he isn’t going to get to him before it's too late. 

Steve’s expression is set this time, his mouth soft despite the stony determination etched into every line of his face, and eyes gentle. He isn’t going to lose him. Not anymore.

Bucky takes his hand.

Steve smiles. 

“You’re with me, to whatever bloody, terrible place this train will take you?” Bucky can’t help but ask, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice as he turns to look fully at the other man.

Steve gently pulls Bucky towards him so he can wrap his free arm around his shivering form, keeping his hand firmly clasped in Bucky’s.

“I’m with you to the end of the line, Buck. No matter where it may lead.”

And there was something about Steve Rogers that leaves Bucky knowing that if there's anyone in the world he can trust to see this through to the end with him, it's Steve.


	8. Start All Over and Win Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers have a mission and, after seven months of living at Stark Tower, Bucky is given his first chance to see if he can handle being on his own - and, if he can be trusted with it. 
> 
> Sam is surprised to find he has far more doubts about the former, than he does about the latter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from [Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbHeNkqRWtI)
> 
> Sam and Bucky finally get a chance to talk about stuff, because everything always needs more Sam. 
> 
> If you have any requests for things you would like me to explore, either from Bucky's time at Stark Tower, or the months where he was on his own, just leave a comment below with your ideas and I'll see if anything strikes me with inspiration.
> 
> Shout out to the ever patient and forever awesome thedisreputabledog, whose original idea gave birth to this fic, and without whom it would not exist.

At first, this sounds like a wonderful idea. 

Steve has a mission from Fury. Something secret, something he can't tell Bucky. He's taking the rest of the Avengers with him, except for Sam Wilson, who has drawn the short straw and is the one staying behind to make sure Hydra doesn't take advantage of their absence to besiege the Tower in search of the Winter Soldier. It's Pepper’s idea to give Bucky the chance to be alone for the first time since coming to stay with Steve. She initially invites Bucky to stay with her, while the Tower is mostly empty, but then changes her mind when the thought strikes her that Bucky has not been given a chance to try being on his own for more than an hour.

This is a good chance for Bucky to see if being left to his own devices is something he can manage, and, for the rest of the group to finally acknowledge that he's no longer the Winter Soldier, and can be trusted to be on his own. It’s been seven months since he came to the Tower, after all. It's time to start giving him a little more space.

Besides, it's only supposed to be for a couple days. Bucky spent the first several months on his own, after escaping Hydra, and those had been living on the streets and eating from the garbage. Surely, with all the resources at his disposal in Stark Tower, he can handle a few days without Steve and his friends. 

So he smiles and accepts Steve’s unhappy kiss goodbye, watching him leave in one of Stark’s planes until the horizon swallows it up. 

But, three days in and with a text message from Steve saying they have been delayed, displaying bright and loud on his new cell phone, a gift from Pepper, Bucky isn’t quite so sure, anymore.

The first day had been easy enough. He sits on the couch and spends the entire afternoon eating Froot Loops while watching movies on something Tony calls a Netflix. 

But then night comes and sleep eludes him. He does all the things his therapist recommends for when he's struggling to find peace in the darkness. He takes a bath. He eats something warm. He jerks off and even manages to make himself come after almost a half hour of fruitless tugging, too frustrated with his wide eyed wakefulness to really enjoy it. He even tries sleeping in the closet, hoping the subconsciously acknowledged safe space might let him get a few minutes of rest.

When he closes his eyes, the shadows creep in, and when the shadows come, so do the nightmares. 

Visions of his friends, bleeding and broken, dying, in some faraway place where Bucky can't protect them. An unknown face through the scope of his rifle, smiling at a joke until the Soldier puts a bullet through the middle of it. Steve’s body lying twisted in a pile of rubble, unmoving. 

A little girl in a pool of blood, ugly red staining her blue silk night dress.

Bucky doesn't sleep.

Steve will be home soon. He doesn't need to sleep, yet.

Pepper visits him on the second day to see how he's doing, and to drop off a few groceries, before she heads to the other side of the city for a business meeting. She lets him know Sam is just upstairs if he needed anything. She’s trying to show him that she trusts him. Bucky almost wishes she didn’t, just so she will stay.

Bucky doesn’t go upstairs to see Sam, not even when the fourth day dawns early, and the world starts to get a bit… technicolor. 

He’s too nauseous and exhausted to eat at this point and he can’t focus on the television long enough to really absorb anything that’s happening on the screen. He finds the loudest action movie in Tony’s Netflix queue and lays down on the floor, fighting against the heaviness of his eyelids.

Bad things came for him in the dark. He has to stay awake. 

He’s so focused on trying not to fall asleep that he doesn’t hear the heavy knocking of a fist against the door, at first. It’s only when there’s a break in the action on the television that he realizes someone is there at all. 

He stands with a pained noise and shuffled towards the door, tugging up the hood of Steve’s sweatshirt to try and hide that he hasn’t washed his hair or shaved in three days.

In his exhaustion, he doesn’t really pay attention to his own strength when he grabs at the doorknob with his left hand and yanks it open, only noticing he’d been a bit excessive when it swings all the way open and hits the wall with a loud thud, punching a neat hole in the drywall.

Whatever. He's too tired to really care, and it isn’t like Stark can't afford to patch it up.

“Man, you look like something the cat _wouldn’t_ drag in,” comes a voice from in front of him.

Right. Visitor. 

Apparently he’s been staring vacantly at the door, as if not quite sure how it got there, and ignoring the reason why he’d opened it in the first place. 

He looks back and sees Sam standing in the hallway, wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt, and carrying a paper bag tucked under his elbow. Bucky grunts and stands back to let him in, folding his arms in front of his chest. 

“You’d be the expert on that, seeing as you have to look at it in the mirror every day,” Bucky quips irritably, further annoyed by the way Sam only chuckles at that and guides him to sit down at the kitchen table. 

How dare he be so chipper and well rested? It's disgusting and definitely unfair and Bucky hates his stupid, happy face. 

He’s glowering at the kitchen table until an enormous plastic cup fills his vision, emblazoned with the words ‘SUPER BIG GULP’ in large, bubble lettering. It looks like a bucket, filled with what resembles blue snow. 

“It’s called a slurpee, and it’s basically a sugar kick right in the ass to keep you going when you feel like you’re about to fall over.”

Bucky decides his earlier assessment of Sam is a little hasty.

Sam Wilson is clearly a God among men, and not at all stupid or disgusting. 

He pulls the cup towards him and nearly jams the straw down his throat in his enthusiasm to inhale as much of the drink as he can possibly handle. He only stops when the vicious ache of brain freeze demands he take a break, folding his arms on the table and resting his forehead against them to try and quell the throbbing in his sinuses. 

There’s quiet between them, for a bit, as Sam moves around the kitchen without a word, and Bucky can hear him turning on the stove top, and the faint metallic sound of a can being opened. 

“I figured you might be having a rough time,” he says finally, and his voice is even and void of any sort of judgment or mocking, “They weren’t supposed to be gone for this long.”

Steve had promised it would be just a day or two, and then he’d come home. 

“He said he wasn’t sure, yet, when they would be back, and it could be a few more days,” Bucky grunts, tipping his head so that he can watch what Sam is doing. He sees a soup can on the counter beside the stove and Sam is stirring a wooden spoon around a pot. Bucky can smell chicken and carrots. 

Despite himself, his stomach gives an interested growl. He hasn’t eaten anything but Froot Loops in four days. 

“I miss him.”

His gaze is drawn to the open cupboard beside the fridge, and he can see Sam has stocked it with four new boxes of the colorful cereal, which is nice, since Bucky has been running low. 

Sam turns to look at him, sighing when he sees the pitiful look of loneliness on Bucky’s face. He hasn’t been alone for more than an hour or two coming to Stark Tower, and even then there's always someone around he can seek out for company. Much of the reason why he has recovered so quickly is because he never has to be alone. He can seek solitude, when he needs it, in the bedroom or the bathroom, but, he can always rely on Steve, or Natasha and Clint, to be just in the other room when he needs them. 

Bucky doesn't know Sam very well at all. Part of that is Sam’s fault. He’s been reluctant to trust the Winter Soldier, and is wary of his motives for suddenly appearing in Stark Tower, after months of hiding from Steve’s pursuits. Bucky had sensed that uncertainty and kept his distance from Sam, even long after Sam started to accept the man’s presence in their lives. 

He wonders if maybe it is too soon to leave Bucky on his own. He’s spent many more years as the Winter Soldier, after all, than he has as Bucky Barnes. It has to be hard to remain in the present, when the past is like an unwelcome guest knocking against an unlocked door – eventually, one way or another, it will find its way inside.

Sam's surprised to realize he's more worried that Bucky isn’t emotionally ready for that kind of step than whether Bucky can be trusted not to betray them. 

When it is only going to be a day or two, Sam figures that it's worth giving it a try, just to see. Bucky has been surprising them with his steady progress this entire time, after all, and he is resilient for having survived this long.

But four days and counting, locked up in that apartment on his own and unable to know if the people he cares about are safe or not, is enough to drive even the most mentally sound man into a frenzy, never mind a recovering prisoner of war. 

“Natasha will look after him. Steve will be home soon, they all will, and you can punch him for being late when he gets here, but first you gotta take care of yourself,” Sam sighs, and Bucky grunts by way of response, tugging the straw down so he could drink more of the bright blue slushie. It tasted like sour raspberries, and he liked the way it made his mouth water. It sat heavy in his empty belly, quieting the noises of hunger, more or less.

“When I close my eyes, the shadows come, and I can’t breathe,” Bucky admits in a quiet voice, running his prosthetic fingers through the cup’s condensation on the table, just to feel the cool dampness of it. 

Sam sets a plastic bowl on the table beside the cup and sits down at the chair opposite Bucky, his expression contemplative. Bucky leans his head up just enough to see what he has been given, breathing the smell of chicken soup deep into his lungs. 

“Nightmares are hard to get past. I certainly had my fair share of them, when I returned from the war,” Sam says softly, and Bucky can feel the other man’s eyes on him as he takes a tentative spoonful of the soup and puts it in his mouth, testing the flavor on his tongue. 

“I’d see my friend fall from the sky over and over, and remember how helpless I felt, knowing there was nothing I could do to save him. The pain of thinking I was just there to watch him die.”

Bucky looks up from the soup and studies Sam, head cocked faintly to the side. He’s never heard this story, before. Besides Thor, who is rarely at Stark Tower, Bucky knows the least about Sam Wilson. Hydra doesn't have a file on the man, as Sam had been a no one on their radar until he became the Falcon and fought with Captain America, and the man himself has spent little time with Bucky on his own, except when it had been his turn to watch him in the early days. 

Sam never really seemed to trust him, and Bucky had been wary, at first, that he would suss out his plans, and later, assumes that Sam just dislikes him. A mutual disinterest in connecting with one another.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks finally, rubbing the palm of his hand absently against the stubbled growth on his cheek, “Aren’t you worried I’ll use this information to hurt you?”

He watches as Sam flinches at that, and is intrigued by the expression of guilt he sees, instead of anger or distrust. 

“No, Bucky, I’m not. I won’t lie to you. At first, I didn’t trust your motives for coming here. I thought, maybe, Hydra had sent you, or you were still trying to complete your mission to kill Steve and Natasha,” Sam says plainly, and Bucky’s eyes narrow faintly, assessing. 

“But I’ve watched you struggle through nightmares and memories and setbacks that would send most other men to an asylum, or their graves. You’ve made it clear that you want to get better, and that you aren’t the man that threw me off Project Insight from very, very high up in the air.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to flinch, and he remembers what Sam had said not half a minute ago.

_“I’d see my friend fall from the sky over and over, and remember how helpless I felt, knowing there was nothing I could do to save him. The pain of thinking I was just there to watch him die.”_

Bucky had left Sam on the ground, stranded and unable to get to Steve. He’d forced him to relive that experience, that feeling of hopelessness and fear. 

Even if Sam says that Bucky isn’t the man who had tried to kill him, anymore, it still makes him feel rotten to realize he's put him through that again. 

He ducks his head and stares at his half eaten soup, feeling his stomach churning unhappily. He forces the rest of it down, not wanting to further slight Sam by letting the soup he’d made for Bucky go cold.

He doesn’t realize that Sam has stood up and moved around the table to stand beside him until a gentle hand is resting on his shoulder, squeezing.

“I’m telling you this, so that you know you’re not alone, Bucky. Not so you can beat yourself up over something that can’t be changed,” Sam murmurs softly and Bucky lets himself be carefully guided to his feet and out of the kitchen, loose limbed and more exhausted than he ever remembers feeling in his life.

“We all deal with nightmares, and shadows of the past that have come to haunt us. You know Natasha and Clint do, and so does Steve. Even Tony still has nightmares about the Battle of New York. We’ve all learned how to manage them, with time, and so will you. You just have to find something that makes you happy, and use it as a tool to help you manage the bad stuff.”

Something that makes him happy?

Being with Steve makes him happy, and Clint and Natasha. Froot Loops make him happy. Movie nights on the couch make him happy. 

Being at Stark Tower makes him happy. 

“What makes you happy?” Bucky asks quietly, sinking down onto the couch at Sam’s pointed look and slowly leaning over until he’s sprawled out on his side, vaguely registering the weight of a blanket being settled over him. It smells like Steve. 

Sam sits down on the floor in front of the couch, and now Bucky can smell Sam, the man’s shoulders right in his line of sight. He smells like cinnamon and aftershave. 

“Music.”

Bucky closes his eyes and sighs softly as Sam gives a few orders to Jarvis, and soon the gentle sound of a drum and cymbals fills the air of the apartment. 

“Marvin Gaye, Trouble Man,” Bucky mumbles, and he can hear the smile on Sam’s face without even needing to see it. 

“You know it?” he asks in a low chuckle, and Bucky shrugs absently, shuffling on the couch until his forehead is pressing against Sam’s shoulder.

“Steve has it on his playlist.”

Bucky likes music. All sorts of music, from the strange, modern pop music that the radio plays, to the old swing jazz he's familiar with from his time. While he struggles to remember his own past, Bucky can remember music. He can name every single song on Steve’s playlist, and Natasha’s, after only a few opening notes. Music is easy. Music gives words to all the things that make Bucky feel good, and all the things that make him ache. Music makes it easier for Bucky to remember what it is like to feel alive, and drown out the haunting shadow of the Soldier on the edge of his consciousness.

“Maybe I’ll try that next time,” he thinks out loud, his fingers curling around a handful of Sam’s t-shirt sleeve. If Sam is uncomfortable with the show of affection, he doesn’t express it. Bucky appreciates that, because, after so many months of constant physical contact, the last four days by himself have been rough. 

“Try what?” Sam prompts, and Bucky can feel him tucking the blanket under Bucky’s elbow, somehow managing to succeed despite the awkward angle. 

“Music.”

They lapse into comfortable silence once more as Bucky allows himself to doze, feeling more at ease with the idea of sleeping now that there's someone here to keep him from doing anything harmful because of a nightmare. 

“I’m sorry I almost killed you, and made you relive what happened to your friend,” he says finally, and, to his credit, Sam doesn’t startle at the apology. He just chuckles softly, and reaches out to pat Bucky’s knee.

“I forgive you, Bucky, if you’ll forgive me for making an ass of myself these past couple months, and not trusting you.”

Bucky’s eyes blink open and he stares at the small patch of Sam’s shirt that’s in front of him, fingers tightening around the soft fabric. 

“You were… probably right, not to trust me at first. I hadn’t done anything to earn your trust other than try to kill you, and Steve. It was logical.”

And deserved. 

Bucky hasn’t felt the flare up of guilt over his initial intentions towards Steve in those early months for a long time. He isn’t that thing, not anymore. He's James Buchanan Barnes.

But hearing Sam apologize for mistrust that he deserved is hard. 

“All the same, man. I’m truly sorry for making you feel like I didn’t want you here.”

Bucky closes his eyes again, and his stomach twists at the sincerity in Sam’s voice. 

“And, do you?” he finds himself asking, “Want me here, that is?”

Sam’s response is automatic and heartfelt, and it unclenches something in Bucky’s chest he didn’t realize has been worrying him all this time. 

“Of course I do. You belong here, just as much as the rest of us.”

Bucky smiles and he’s pretty sure Sam can feel the curve of his mouth against his shoulder. 

Silence settles between them again, save the faint rustle of pages, and Bucky assumes Sam must have brought a book to read. The idea that Sam has come prepared to sit with him for an indefinite amount of time makes him absurdly happy, and he lets himself sink into a comfortable stupor, letting the sound of Steve’s music settle over him like a security blanket. 

But another thought strikes him, one he’d been worrying over for the past few weeks, and before he can stop himself, he’s blurting the words out in a rush.

“Steve and I are having sex.”

Sam jerks backwards so suddenly at this that he cracks Bucky on the nose, sending the man’s head into the thankfully soft couch cushions. Bucky pulls his hands up to grab at his nose and groans, his eyes watering as Sam whips around, embarrassment painted on his face.

“Oh God, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you,” he scrambles, prying Bucky’s hands away so he can make sure his nose isn’t broken. It isn’t even bleeding, though, there is a little swelling and tenderness around the bridge, and Sam sighs apologetically. And things had been going so well, too. 

“You should warn a guy before you drop bombs like that.”

Bucky sits up with a shrug, trying to stem his streaming eyes as his nose throbs unpleasantly. 

“I didn’t realize it was such a big deal,” he replies, tone guarded and expression wary. Steve had said things were more accepting and open, these days, than they ever had been in their time. He assumes it isn’t something to be ashamed of, anymore. 

He can tell Sam realizes his faux pas, and he watches the man backpedaling, sitting on his heels as he rubs a hand over his face as he tries to organize his thoughts.

“It isn’t man, don’t worry about it. I was just surprised, is all. I wasn’t expecting you to want to talk about it with me, of all people.”

Bucky sees Sam hesitating, now, and cocks his head to the side, hand still covering his sore nose. The other man has a question for him and is struggling to find a way to ask it.

“I’m not getting any younger,” Bucky prods, arching an eyebrow when Sam twitches again, and swallows thickly. 

“Bucky, you… Having sex is something you’re ready for, right? Steve didn’t do anything to make you feel… pressured into it?” Sam asks awkwardly, and Bucky is so stunned by the sheer absurdity of the idea that he can’t form a reply for several long, uncomfortable seconds. 

Part of him is warmed by the thought that Sam is worried about him, and is willing to endure asking a potentially painful question to make sure that Bucky is safe. 

The rest of him is just offended by the very idea of anyone thinking Steve is capable of such a thing.

“No!” he shouts, wincing at the volume with which the word explodes from his chest.

He tries again.

“No. No, Steve didn’t do anything like that. He waited until I asked for it first, before we had sex,” Bucky says slowly, and this is where his face pinches and his gaze drops to his lap, lowering his hands from his swollen nose.

“Sometimes I.. I worry that _I’m_ the one making him feel pressured.”

He looks up at Sam and sees the uncertainty in his eyes, wondering if maybe he should ask someone else, after all, if Sam finds discussing sex this uncomfortable.

But then there’s a broad, brown hand settling over his own, and Sam squeezes it comfortingly.

“It’s okay, Bucky. I’m here to listen. You’d be surprised how many soldiers I’ve had to discuss sex with, when I worked at Veteran’s Affairs. It’s not uncommon, what you’re feeling, and it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. You just caught me by surprise.”

Bucky eyes him nervously, but doesn’t pull his hand away.

“Well. Everything is always on my terms, when we… have sex. It’s always the things I want, or things that make me feel good. Steve never asks for anything, or asks me to have sex first. We only have sex when I ask him, or when I take the first step to move it beyond just kissing. And it’s always the way I want it. And I just.. worry that he feels pressured, and that we’re only having sex because I want to, and he doesn’t want to tell me no.”

He feels an emptiness in his chest at finally giving voice to the thoughts that have sat heavy in his heart for these past few weeks he and Steve have started being intimate. They have sex, a lot, since that first time, and that's how Bucky had started to notice a trend.

A trend of him always getting what he wants, and Steve never saying what _he_ wants.

Sam’s expression is carefully neutral, and he doesn’t break eye contact with Bucky as he responds. He doesn’t want there to be even a single, lingering doubt when he leaves this apartment that what he’s about to say is the complete truth.

“Bucky, things are always on your terms because Steve is afraid of hurting you, or pushing you. He doesn’t want you to feel pressured to do a single thing you don’t want to do, because he’s not sure, yet, that you’ll tell him no if he asks for something you don’t like. He doesn’t want you to think all he gets from your relationship is sex, and so he makes sure everything is always on your terms, because then he knows for sure that it’s something you want. Does that make sense?” Sam prods, and Bucky digests the words, eyes distant.

He supposes that it really does make sense when he thinks about it. Steve certainly seems quite enthusiastic when they have sex, once he's sure that sex is what Bucky is angling for. And he's always happy, afterwards, when they lay tangled together in their bed. He’s never given Bucky any cause to doubt his willingness, other than his lack of drive to initiate their sexual encounters. 

“Yeah, it.. It really does, actually,” he murmurs finally, mouth dry around the words.

He leans forward so that his forehead thunks against Sam’s shoulder, drying the remaining dampness from his watering eyes on his t-shirt. Sam’s arms come up to wrap around his back, and there’s a gentle hand rubbing up and down his spine, soothing away any lingering anxiety he has about how the other man feels about him. 

“That stupid, noble punk. He could have just talked to me about it, instead of taking all of that onto his own shoulders and deciding if I was ready for me,” he grumbles, and he can feel the rumble of Sam’s laughter beneath his cheek.

“Yeah, Steve kind of has a habit of assuming he knows what’s best for everyone else, and gets it in his head it’s his job to protect us all from ourselves,” Sam agrees, rubbing his hand in a slow, even circle between Bucky’s shoulder blades. 

They stay like that for a few more minutes until Sam goes to dislodge the other man, only to realize that Bucky has passed out cold against his shoulder, his breathing deep and even. He stifles an amused chuckle and carefully lays him back down on the couch, moving to stand so he can get ice for Bucky’s nose when he’s stopped by a hand closing around his own.

Bucky is staring up at him through slitted eyes, fighting the urge to fall back asleep. 

“Stay?” is all he has to say, clutching at Sam’s hand like it’s a lifeline. 

Sam sits back down on the floor beside the couch and nods, letting Bucky curl up so that his head is pillowed on Sam’s shoulder. 

“As long as you want me to,” he murmurs, and it’s what Bucky needs to hear to let himself fall back asleep. 

It’s the first restful sleep he’s gotten in four days. 

Sam stays with him for three more days, until Steve finally returns with the rest of the Avengers in tow. He’s happy that he remembers to shave this morning, and hops through the apartment in a rush to both dress and comb his hair at the same time when he gets the news that they're on their way home. He picks out his most flattering pair of jeans and one of Steve’s more form fitting t-shirts, and has some vague recollection that it's almost like he's getting ready for a date.

When he gets downstairs that feeling of elation only increases until they finally walk in through the door. They all look a little worse for wear, but, they’re alive and their mission is a success and that’s all Bucky really needs to know to automatically forgive them for being gone so long.

Well, most of them.

Sam had joined him on his way to greet them in the lobby of Stark Tower, and Steve is standing at the front of the group, looking sheepish, with a bandage on his knee and his face still dark with dirt. He’s been in such a rush to get home that he hasn’t even taken a shower. 

Which is why Bucky punches him on the shoulder with his right hand, instead of his left.

“That’s for being gone so long, and leaving me here to entertain the birdbrain, you star spangled punk,” he grunts, and Steve has the decency to look embarrassed, even if the rest of them are chuckling at Sam’s loud protesting. 

He reaches up to grab Steve’s face between his palms and stares at him, hard, and Bucky can feel all eyes on them. 

“And this is for coming home in one piece.”

He hauls Steve down for a kiss that borders on pornographic, ignoring Tony’s spluttering attempts to sound grossed out as he licks his way past the other man’s startled lips, sliding one hand up to tangle in his messy hair. 

Once Steve gets with the program, he’s more than happy to slide his hands down to Bucky’s ass and haul him up off the ground, and Bucky circles his legs around his waist without so much as pausing in his assault of Steve’s mouth, arms curling around his shoulders to keep himself upright. 

Steve’s cheeks are red when they finally break apart, though Bucky is pretty sure Clint’s cat calling and Pepper’s amused laughter are more to blame for that than he is, but, it’s hard to care when a slow, contented smile spreads across Steve’s face. 

“I must admit, I’m liking this welcome home a lot more than the one I expected I would get after being gone so long. Did you manage okay on your own?”

Bucky shrugs, tightening his legs around Steve’s waist as the man starts walking past the rest of the Avengers and towards the elevator, pleased that things are finally moving in a direction he definitely wants them to head.

“I got by. Sam came down after a couple days to prod me with a stick and remind me that starvation isn’t exactly a comfortable or enjoyable experience. We listened to a lot of music, and I beat him at Mario Kart,” Bucky hums, feeling Steve tense when he implies that things were a little rough for a while. 

“So you and Sam got along, then? No maiming or verbal bloodletting?” Steve teases, and Bucky is grateful that he doesn’t ask him what happened, even though he knows the man is itching to. 

Another shrug, and Bucky toys with the sensitive lobe of Steve’s ear, being the opposite of helpful as Steve tries to fumble their apartment door open. 

“We worked out some stuff. He can be really smart, when he’s not locking me in the bathroom and refusing to let me out until I wash my hair.”

It isn’t so bad. Bucky does feel more refreshed after, and exacted his revenge in the form of ten straight victories against Sam on Rainbow Road.

Steve is smiling against his cheek, and Bucky sighs contently when he’s laid back against their bed, peering up through his lashes at the man leaning over him.

He stops him with a foot on his chest, though, and he can see the confusion on Steve’s face.

“You are not getting into my pants until you take a shower, soldier boy,” he says plainly, and the pink flush rising in Steve’s cheeks is enough to bring a wicked grin to Bucky’s face.

“But if you make it a fast one, I’d sure like to have a go at sucking that big, pretty cock of yours.”

A flash of uncertainty crosses Steve’s face, and Bucky pauses, remembering what Sam had said.

He takes a deep breath and pulls his t-shirt over his head, liking the cool feeling of the sheets against his bare skin.

“If I didn’t want to do something, Steve, I would tell you. But I don’t want this to always be about me, and what I ask for. I want to make you feel good, too, and do things that you want to do. And if there’s something that makes me uncomfortable, I’ll tell you. I promise,” he murmurs, and it feels odd that _he’s_ the one soothing Steve, after so many months of their roles being reversed.

It also feels kind of nice. 

Like maybe Bucky isn’t a total fuckup, and Steve has problems, too. 

Sam says they all have their nightmares and their demons. And seeing Steve right now, vulnerable in his uncertainty that he's taking advantage, Bucky finds it easy to believe it. 

Steve isn’t perfect, or flawless. Not in the way Bucky has always thought, back when they were younger. Steve is fumbling his way through this just as much as Bucky is.

The way Steve looks embarrassed at being figured out, before he curls down to kiss Bucky, seeking _reassurance_ from Bucky in that moment. 

It makes him feel more needed than all the sex in the world.

Steve draws back with a smile on his lips, and Bucky leans into the fingers sliding through his hair, eyes hooded and mouth aching pleasantly from all the kissing they have been doing in the last couple minutes.

“I trust you.”

There was something about Steve Rogers that makes those three little words feel like the entire world to Bucky. 

Because he knows, when Steve leans in to mouth them against his forehead, what he's really saying is, ‘I love you’.

So what else can Bucky do except turn his head to capture Steve’s lips again, and whisper, “I love you, too.”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maximum cheese factor has been achieved with this chapter, oops.
> 
> I also enabled anonymous/non member commenting, if you wish to leave a comment with ideas/suggestions and don't have an AO3 account.


	9. Come Morning Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve has an interview about what happened with Shield, and Bucky isn't all that impressed with the over friendly nature of the news anchor giving the interview.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from ["Safe and Sound"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhAS_GnJIc) by Taylor Swift.
> 
> So, I remember promising some people bottom!Steve.
> 
> Also featuring thedisreputabledog's suggestion for Bucky feeling jealous over Steve.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Why does she get to touch him like that?”

Bucky’s voice is low and menacing, and if it were actually possible for him to catch fire, he would have burned Stark Tower to the ground by now. Natasha wisely moves away to sit with Pepper and Sam on the other couch, trying her best to be placating. 

“She’s just being a little flirty, James. You know Steve would never actually be interested in her. It never bothers you when he goes to visit Peggy,” she soothes, and Bucky shoots her a withering look.

“She’s interviewing him about the crisis with Shield, there’s no need for there to be flirting with anyone. And Peggy is different. Peggy Carter is special,” he growls dismissively, turning his head back to stare daggers at the television. 

Steve had left early that morning for an interview with some big American news channel about his opinions on the collapse of Shield, and the realization of Hydra’s continued existence in the world. Bucky wants to go with him. They had gone out together many times in the past few weeks, to do shopping, and eat at various restaurants, and see movies. Bucky only experiences a few panic attacks on these ventures, and they're becoming farther and fewer between, now, the more he gets used to being outside. 

But this is different. Bucky can't go with him this time because the risk of being seen and identified is a certainty, and a news station was the last place they really want to be when that happens. 

That didn’t really help Bucky’s mood, which has only grown darker since they’d turned on the television to watch Steve’s interview.

Some part of him doesn't really blame the news host for being over friendly. Steve is attractive, a hero, and a national, historical icon. She isn’t even being all that unprofessional. A hand on his forearm when he speaks about the lives lost. Sitting a little closer to him on the couch than is necessary, perhaps, but not overtly so. A slap to his knee when he tells a joke.

She's definitely making eyes at him, though. Bucky hasn't missed the way she admires and appreciates Steve when he steps up onto the stage, and her questions have started to get flirtier and less subtle. 

He almost puts his fist through the screen when she asks him to flex his arms so she can feel the muscles, his jaw squared off and eyebrows pinched.

“Are you… actually jealous, man?”

Sam sounds almost incredulous and the way his words result in three pairs of eyes focusing directly on Bucky makes heat creep up the back of his neck, folding his arms across his chest with a petulant expression.

“No, I am not,” he grunts and Sam snorts in laughter.

“Really? ‘Cause it looks like you’ve got a serious case of the jellies going on.”

Sam ducks just in time to miss the pillow that's flung at his face, dodging sideways into Natasha, who is clearly unimpressed with his choice of shield. 

“James, you know Steve couldn’t be less interested in her,” Pepper tries her hand at placating the miserable man opposite them, arching an eyebrow when all she gets is a non-committal grumble in response. 

“There’s really no need to be jealous. You’re the one that Steve is actually with.”

Bucky shrugs and looks away from all of them, chin ducking and face red with embarrassment.

“I’m not jealous that Steve is with her, right now,” he says finally and Sam comes out from his hiding spot against Natasha long enough to look as confused as the other two. 

“Yeah? Then why have you been trying to immolate this woman through the television for the last thirty minutes, exactly?” he asks in a careful tone, poised to dodge any more airborne objects that might be heading in his direction. 

Bucky grunts and looks over at them from behind his hair, eyes flitting between the three people in the room and the two on the screen.

“I’m jealous that she, that a _stranger_ , gets to sit there and touch him, and be with him, and flirt and make goo-goo eyes at him, in front of the entire world,” he mutters, and the faces opposite him all lit up with dawning comprehension. Bucky chances a look at them and is annoyed by the mingled reactions of pity, understanding, and sadness that he sees. He stands up sharply and walks away from them, decidedly unwilling to listen to whatever attempts at soothing him they might make. 

There's nothing they could say that would change how things have to be. 

Bucky is the Winter Soldier. Hydra’s monstrous freak of nature. A volatile weapon, with the blood of who knew how many people staining his hands. He can't be known to the world as Captain America’s lover. 

Steve would be the one to suffer, if it ever came to light that he's with Bucky. As it is, they’d already had a close call, where a picture of them kissing at a restaurant had almost been leaked to the press. Luckily, Bucky’s face is obscured by the angle of the photo and the hat he’d been wearing, and Stark Industries happens to intercept the photo before it's broadcast, purchasing all copies of it from the person who had taken it. It had been a close call, though, and the moment that photo ran it would mean an end to their trips into the city together.

Once Steve Rogers is revealed to be having a mysterious gay love affair, he’d never get a moment of peace, and there’d be people everywhere, eager to snap photos of every man he's seen in public with. Bucky would be recognized and connections would be made. 

The virtuous Captain America would never hear the end of it, after it's revealed he's having that gay love affair with the Hydra assassin that should have been executed or imprisoned for life. He would lose the trust of the people he has sacrificed himself numerous times over to protect. 

The idea that they would so easily betray Steve made Bucky angry. 

Angry at the world. Angry at Hydra. Mostly just angry at himself. 

He slams the bathroom door shut and undresses, every movement edged with frustration. Steve said the world is a more tolerant place, now. Bucky isn’t so sure he is correct in that assumption, if the world will see him as something less if he's in love with another man. 

Or maybe they will just see him as less for choosing someone as tainted as the Winter Soldier. 

Bucky turns the shower on and steps into the expansive cube, making sure every single nozzle is blasting water just a hair shy of hot enough to burn. He always takes showers on the edge of scalding, which is why Steve usually refuses to join him in this “blistered matrimony”, as he calls it. Bucky likes the heat. It makes it harder to remember the cold invading his lungs, and the darkness that always comes with it. 

The pressure of the water beating down on him takes some of the edge off his anger, soothing out the tension in his muscles, but, the jealousy remains a steady, throbbing wound in his side.

He wants to be the one that gets to joke with Steve in front of the world, and touch him, and flirt with him. He’d had an easier time of getting to show Steve off before the war, and back then they could have been killed if anyone decided they're a little too close to be just friends.

A low, heavy sigh escapes him and he reaches out to soap up his washcloth, scrubbing at his skin until it's pink with cleanliness. 

“Petulant bitterness doesn’t suit you, Barnes. You gotta suck it up and get your shit together,” he tells himself firmly, pausing when he reaches his stomach with the washcloth. 

Well, that's an idea.

He’s pretty sure that the other three have left him to his own devices at this point, so he doesn’t bother to lock the door as he slips to settle on the floor of the shower, leaning against the smooth tile wall so that he can angle his hips just enough to reach what he wants. 

His cock stirs with interest when he cups his palm against his balls, rolling the sensitive sac between his fingers. His skin is smooth and slippery with soap and he takes advantage of the slick glide, curling his hand around his cock and giving it a slow, lazy jerk.

It isn’t very often that Bucky is left to take care of himself when it comes to sex. Steve is usually nearby and is always more than willing to go to bed whenever Bucky askes, and Bucky is always just a half step behind Steve when the other man approaches _him_. A new development, but, Bucky is pleased that Steve is finally starting to ask for the things he wants, rather than always going along with what Bucky asks for or what will make Bucky feel good.

Thinking of Steve, now, Bucky reaches out for the soap again to rub his hand against it, vaguely wondering if it's really an acceptable lubricant. He supposes it really can’t be a terrible one, since it’s meant to clean, and, reaches down between his thighs to rub the soapy digits against his entrance. He can still feel the ache from when Steve had been inside him last night and it’s relatively easy to slip two of his fingers inside himself, a steady sigh escaping him. 

He uses his prosthetic hand to stroke himself from root to tip, watching as he swipes his thumb across the leaking slit. It's much, much easier to do this with his new arm, and the silicone flesh that covers the cool, ridged metal. His therapist had suggested masturbation as a tool to explore, learn, and reconnect with his body, but, Bucky had been incredibly dubious about the idea of using the killing machine Hydra had attached to his shoulder in such a delicate area. 

Especially after it became obvious that Bucky tends to lose his focus on directing the limb when he's enjoying himself so thoroughly. 

But the sensors in the new arm make it feel like an extension of his body as much as his flesh limb, and so he leaves the easy stroking of his cock at the back of his mind, focusing his attention, now, on finding his prostate.

But after several fruitless minutes of searching, it becomes clear that the angle isn’t exactly prime for this sort of venture.

He doesn’t really feel like kneeling on the tile floor, either. He did that once, when Steve had gathered up the nerve to join him for a scalding shower and Bucky decided he wasn’t about to let the morning wood jutting between those pale thighs just go to waste. 

He’d been in pain for the rest of the day and told Steve that it is definitely not happening again until they get a nice, smooth rubber mat for the shower floor. 

With a quick, cursory dunk beneath the spray to wash the soap from his skin, Bucky turns off the water and steps out of the shower to towel himself dry, his cock still full against his belly. Steve shouldn’t be home for another half hour or so. Bucky has plenty of time to take care of business before he dresses and figures out some way of telling Steve he liked his interview without giving away that he had spent most of it yelling at the interviewer to stop touching him and throwing things at Sam. 

He tosses the damp towel onto the floor and peeks out into the living room, just to make sure that his visitors are really gone, before he moves to the bedroom, making a beeline for his bureau and tugging open the top drawer. It takes a bit of rummaging to find what he’s looking for, but, he finally locates the silicone toy buried beneath his socks, grinning when his fingers close around it. Natasha had sent him the link to the sex toy website as a joke, when Bucky had asked her for ideas on what to get Steve for his birthday.

He hadn’t ended up getting Steve anything from the website, but, Bucky had ordered a couple things for himself. Curiosity, he insists, when he asks Natasha if he can borrow one of her credit cards. There's nothing wrong with a healthy, sexually active adult wanting to explore some of the more exotic forms of sex, right? 

She’d shrugged and told him that whatever he gets up to in bed is his own business, and that she isn’t about to judge him one way or another on however he chooses to do it. 

The toys haven’t gotten much use since they’d arrived in the mail, as Steve is generally a much more enjoyable alternative, but, every once in a while, Bucky will find himself on his own for an afternoon or two, and he’ll experiment with the hidden treasures. 

He still hasn’t told Steve about them. He isn’t really sure how one is supposed to go about telling a partner about stuff like this. 

Bucky slides onto the bed and sighed at the glide of the cool sheets against his overheated skin, settling on his knees with his ass in the air. He checks that the batteries are still inside the little dial box at the end of the cord connected to the flared bottom of the vibrator before he grabs the lube bottle off the bedside table. 

Already on edge at having been denied what he wanted earlier, he takes little time in slicking up the dark purple surface of the toy, curving his arm over his back so that he can press the tip against his hole. This particular vibrator is one of Bucky’s favorites because it's slim and tapered, easy to push inside of himself even when he isn’t terribly stretched, yet. It sinks in inch by inch, and he sighs when the flared end is snug against his ass, taking a moment to enjoy the fullness that the toy gives him. 

It isn’t as nice as Steve’s cock, but, beggars can't be choosers, and the toy definitely has its perks.

Bucky reaches out for the dial and thumbs it up to the first setting, moaning low when a buzzing sound fills the air. The toy is nudging right up against his prostate, and the vibrations feel delicious on the sensitive gland, sending sparks of pleasant arousal dancing up his spine. 

He sinks down against the bed so he can rut his cock against the smooth surface, hips rolling into the delicious friction. Maybe someday he’ll ask Steve to fuck him with the toy still inside. That would be the best of both worlds.

“Steve,” he sighs, flicking the vibrator up to the next setting and jerking against the bed, his breathing coming in sharp, ragged gasps. He reaches back to grip the base of the vibrator and starts to fuck it in and out of himself, grinding his cock down onto the mattress every time it bottoms out against his prostate. He doesn’t hear the apartment door closing, or the faint click of the doorknob being turned on the bedroom door. 

He’s far too close to the edge for that, and later Bucky will relish the fact that there is a single thing in this universe that can turn off the deeply embedded training of the Winter Soldier, even if only for a little while. 

“Steve,” he whines again, turning the vibrator up to the highest setting and pushing it all the way inside himself, raising himself back up onto his knees so that he can snake a hand between his thighs to grip at his cock. 

It only takes a few quick pumps of his hand before he’s coming, his hips rocking with each wave of pleasure. He’s clenching around the toy inside him, and the ache of over stimulation is a dull throb in his belly, bordering on unpleasant. He turns the vibrator off and reaches back to pull it out with a low sigh, until a small cough from behind him immediately sets every inch of his body on edge. 

He rolls over onto his side, about to verbally annihilate whoever decided to interrupt Bucky, and stalls completely when he sees Steve standing there, face flush red and pupils blown wide with lust, his jeans looking decidedly tight and uncomfortable in that moment. 

“Hi,” is all Steve manages to say, and Bucky decides to enact a little bit of revenge for having to spend the afternoon watching Steve get groped by someone that isn’t him. 

He slips onto his back and leaves his legs sprawled open just enough to expose the flared, purple end of the vibrator nestled against his ass, his arms folded over his chest and his eyebrow raised. 

“Can I help you?” he asks evenly, as if Steve had walked in on him watching a movie, and not fucking himself with a vibrator and moaning his name into the sheets. He’s amused by the way Steve’s cheeks grow even darker, and the blush creeps clear to the tips of his ears. The jealous ache in his chest is eased, somewhat, by the look of raw desire that Steve is giving him, and the appreciative way his eyes sweep over Bucky, spread out on their bed as he is. 

“Oh, I can think of a few things you can do to help me,” Steve manages to say, and Bucky snorts, folding one arm idly behind his head and running his free hand through the cooling streaks of white on his belly to collect some on his fingers. 

“Yeah? Like what, soldier boy?” he asks, feigning innocence as he pops a finger into his mouth and sucks it clean, making sure to include sound effects as he swirls his tongue around the digit, pulling it out with a loud ‘pop’ before moving onto the next one.

The noise Steve makes sounds pained but he doesn’t move from the doorway just yet. Bucky’s pretty sure that someone must have made him aware that not everyone enjoyed his interview that afternoon.

“Like letting me apologize for not asking Miss Steins to stop flirting with me, and maybe, allow me to make it up to you?” Steve stammers, and he can’t really blame Steve for his lack of focus when Bucky’s currently licking between his fingers like the worst kind of tease. 

He cocks his head to the side for a long moment, as if considering what the other man is offering, tapping his saliva sticky fingers against his chest.

“I mean, I can’t really fault her for wanting to flirt with you. It’d be difficult for anyone to resist the charms and boyish features of Captain America,” he hums idly, enjoying the chance to watch Steve squirm. He doesn’t want to actually upset the other man, though, when there isn’t really anything that could have been done to change the situation. Bucky found he isn’t really even that mad anymore, that it happened. The news caster isn’t the first, or last, person Bucky will see flirting with Steve. And by his own admittance, he isn’t bothered by Steve visiting Peggy, when he knows how things would have turned out with them had Steve not crashed that plane. 

“I wasn’t jealous that she was touching you, or flirting with you. I know you’d never actually be interested in her, and there’s really no harm in letting her have a little fun flirting with you. I was just jealous that she’s _able_ to do all that so openly, in front of the whole world, and I can’t,” he admits finally, and sees the comprehension in Steve’s eyes, followed immediately by guilt.

Bucky sighs, beckoning Steve forward enough that he can reach out and pull him down onto the bed, finding his mouth for a soft kiss.

“I understand why it’s necessary, Steve. I don’t blame you. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it, even if I do accept it as the reality of what and who we are,” he murmurs against his lips, and he can feel the downturn of Steve’s mouth. He draws back enough to see his face, fingers rubbing gently through the short hairs at the back of Steve’s neck. 

“I never dared to dream that I would ever get to be with you at all, Steve. Getting to live with you, and not have to worry that someone is going to kill us, or that the next asthma attack will be too much, or a bullet will find its mark, and I’ll lose you, is more than I could have ever hoped for.”

Steve closes the distance between them to press his forehead against Bucky’s and the former assassin takes the chance to enjoy the simple closeness of him, their noses brushing and lips mere inches apart. 

“But is it enough, Bucky?” Steve asks quietly, and Bucky lets his gaze flit between Steve’s eyes and his mouth, fingers sliding up into Steve’s dark blond hair. 

“You’ve always been enough for me, Steve. I never wanted for anything else, so long as I had you in my life,” he sighs, relieved when this makes a smile spread across the other man’s face. Bucky doesn't like to see Steve upset or hurting, especially not when he's the cause of it. 

Still, there was the matter of compensation for Bucky’s afternoon, wasted on watching some stranger flirt with Steve. 

“But, I’m still gonna fuck you so hard that you’ll be too sore to flirt with pretty dames on television for quite a long time,” he adds and the choked off noise of surprise this gets from Steve is especially enjoyable for Bucky. 

He pushes Steve over onto his back with a dark chuckle, sitting on the man’s thighs and observing him like he is the spoils of war, trailing his fingers idly over Steve’s belt.

“You sure, Buck? We’ve never.. You don’t have to, if it makes you uncomfortable,” Steve says breathlessly, and Bucky knows that Steve has been wanting this for some time, but has held back on asking out of concern that Bucky won't want to do it. Which, Bucky would be a bald faced liar if he even tries to say he hasn’t been itching to flip the tables, and see how pretty Steve is when he's spread out beneath Bucky. 

He’s been dreaming about what Steve would look like, impaled on his cock and sprawled across their bed like an offering to the Gods, since they were teenagers and just starting to figure out what lust was. Steve, skinny and pale and fragile beneath Bucky’s fingers, opening up so beautifully for him. 

Steve may not be that illness stricken, stubborn little punk anymore, but that doesn't mean Bucky still isn't harboring the desire to see what he looks like wrapped around Bucky’s dick.

Actually, Steve is still a stubborn little punk, but that is neither here nor there.

“Just because I happen to prefer being filled up with that pretty cock doesn’t mean I’m uninterested in returning the favor, now and then,” Bucky says, instead of admitting that he’s harbored this fantasy since he first learned how his dick worked, tugging Steve’s belt through the loops at a snail’s pace and tossing it aside, using the heels of his palms to push his shirt up towards his armpits. 

“Maybe you should show me how much you want my cock, by taking off the rest of your clothes.”

Bucky sits back on his haunches, the vibrator still a pleasurable pressure inside of him, and watches as Steve struggles to pull his clothing off without getting off the bed, admiring the way the muscles of his chest ripple beneath his skin. 

Steve is, and always has been, the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen. 

He doesn’t move until Steve kicks the last of his clothing off the edge of the bed, picking up the bottle of lube he’d tossed aside during his earlier exploits and pressing it into Steve’s hand, a wicked grin on his lips.

“I want to watch you open yourself up for me. Make yourself ready to take my cock,” he growls, surprised by the roughness of his own voice. In his defense, this is a very, very long awaited dream in the making, and he's going to milk it for all it's worth. If the way Steve’s cheeks turn ruddy red are anything to go by, he’s definitely enjoying the sudden switch of their roles in bed, fingers shaking with anticipation as he slicks them up. 

Bucky sits down on the bed and sighs at the pressure this puts on the vibrator inside him, rocking back and forth slightly to tease against his prostate as he admires the sight of Steve drawing his knees up towards his chest, spreading himself open for Bucky, and Bucky alone.

“She may have gotten to touch you on camera, but I’m the only one that gets to see you like this,” he whispers, gnawing on his lower lip as he watches Steve push a finger inside of himself, moaning Bucky’s name. It doesn’t escape Bucky that Steve is no novice at that, and a low throb of arousal fills his belly at the idea of Steve having done this before.

“Yeah, Stevie? That feel good? You’re gonna need at least three in there before I can fuck you, so you better be thorough.”

Steve’s cock jumps at the words, a low, rumbling whine escaping his mouth, and Bucky files that away for future rumination. It seems Steve has a thing for being told what to do, and God does that mean a world of possibilities. 

“Add a second finger. Spread yourself open for me, nice and wide, Steve,” he orders, resting his hands on Steve’s thighs so he can push them up higher, and further apart, shivering at the ragged moan he gets in response. Not wishing for anything to distract him from the sight before him, anymore, he pulls the vibrator out from inside himself and lets it roll off onto the floor somewhere to be washed later, body clenching around the sudden emptiness.

Steve will be in the same boat, soon enough, and that thought is enough to send a spark of raw need shooting right down Bucky's spine.

He watches hungrily as Steve works another thick finger inside himself, resisting the urge to lean in and swallow his cock down. As much as Bucky likes sucking Steve off, he likes the show he's getting far more.

“Have you done this before, Stevie? Fucked yourself with your fingers and wished it was my cock splitting you open?” he asks in a low hum, and is rewarded by a desperate, breathless nod from the man beneath him and the sight of Steve’s fingers scissoring apart to spread himself even wider.

“Yes.. Oh God, Bucky, yes, every time,” Steve keens, his cock, purple and leaking against his belly as he pushes a third finger in alongside the other two, “I’d wait for you to go to work and I’d.. oh.. I’d bury my face in your pillow and fuck myself with my fingers, wishing it was you-“

Steve breaks off into another whimpering moan, but Bucky’s too far gone with imagining his tiny, stubborn Steve in his bed, ass in the air and stuffed full with his own fingers, moaning Bucky’s name. 

“So when I came home and smelled you on my sheets, it isn’t just the desperate, wishful thinking of a lonely, pathetic loser,” he whispers, shuddering at the idea of what might have happened if he’d ever gotten the chance to walk in on Steve doing this, and aching with the loss of something he never knew he could have had. 

He surges forward to crush his mouth against Steve’s, hand sliding between them so he can replace Steve’s fingers with his own, curling them in the tight heat until he finds the nub of his prostate. Bucky swallows every strangled moan Steve makes as he pegs the sensitive gland over and over, Steve’s legs falling down to rest with his knees hooked over Bucky’s shoulders. 

It’s only when Steve gasps that he’s about to come that Bucky finally withdraws his fingers, groping for the bottle of lube so he can slick up his painfully hard cock. He pauses before pushing in, though, to take a mental picture of how Steve looks right now.

His hair is completely disheveled from tossing his head back and forth on the bed, and his mouth is red and puffy from their kissing. He’s got a bit of beard rash on his chin and cheeks from the stubble Bucky hadn’t bothered to shave this morning, and his chest is shiny with sweat, rising and falling rapidly with the staccato panting of his breathing. 

His thighs are spread obscenely wide around Bucky, and the former assassin lets them fall from his shoulders so he can guide them to wrap around his waist, wishing there could be a way to live in this moment forever.

“You’re beautiful, Steve,” he murmurs, all pretense of teasing gone as he strokes his hand up Steve’s quivering side, his eyes hooded and expression warm. This is worth all the long years of waiting because, now, Steve is his, and his alone. 

He curves over Steve’s body to capture him in another desperate kiss as he starts to push his way inside the man beneath him, going slow and easy. Steve may have had sex, before, but it's been a very long time since he’s been penetrated, and Bucky isn’t about to mar the memory of their first time together like this by causing Steve pain. He sneaks a hand between them to curl around the blond man’s cock, stroking it from root to tip to try and distract him from whatever discomfort he might be feeling at being split open by something much bigger than his fingers.

Steve is gasping his name against his mouth and Bucky moans, struggling to resist the urge, and Steve’s pleas, to just bury himself all the way into the tight, wet heat gripping his cock. After what Bucky would swear is an eternity, he finally feels his balls nudging against Steve’s skin and has to count to ten in the crook of Steve’s neck to keep from coming then and there. The snug heat of Steve’s ass around his cock is earth shatteringly delicious, and Bucky moans his arousal into the sweaty skin of Steve’s throat, unable to resist the desire to suck a dark bruise onto the pale flesh. 

It won't fade for a little while. Bucky felt a thrill of possessive delight shoot through him at the idea of Steve covered in his marks for all the world to see. 

It's something, better than nothing, and Bucky will take it.

“So good, Steve, so fucking good,” he growls against his neck, surging up to kiss him again as he finally starts to move, rocking away from the tight, welcoming heat, only to thrust back in again. Bucky releases his hold on Steve’s cock, swallowing the whimpers of protest he gets at this and stilling his hips against him in warning.

“Want you to come on my cock, Steve. Want you to come just from having me fuck you into a quivering, sated mess,” he hisses, and Steve moans at that, his ass clenching around Bucky’s cock inside him. 

He smirks and nudges Steve’s mouth open for a wet, sloppy kiss, licking his way between his lips, and, only when Steve has ceased trying to find friction for his painfully hard cock does he finally move again, starting off slow to tease the man beneath him.

Steve is clutching to Bucky like he’s afraid he’s going to float away, one hand buried in his shaggy hair and the other gripping at his shoulder, digging into the scarring where flesh met silicone, his body jerking each time Bucky bottoms out inside him. He clearly wants more, anticipates more, and who is Bucky to deny him when he's being so good?

Bucky chuckles at this and sucks another bruise high on Steve’s neck, relishing the red rash his beard leaves in his wake. He plants one hand on the bed beside the writhing blond, and the other curls around Steve’s hip, fingers digging into the flesh.

“Better hold on tight, Stevie.”

That’s all the warning Steve gets before Bucky slams his cock deep inside him, immediately setting a brutal pace. He’s pretty sure that Steve’s throaty shout of pleasure is loud enough for Clint to hear him two floors up, and that only spurs him to fuck Steve harder, the lewd sound of wet flesh slapping together filling the room.

“That’s right, Stevie. I want to hear you, nice and loud, so everyone knows who fucking gives it to you the way you need it,” he snarls, and Steve clenches around him so tight that Bucky swears he sees stars. 

He presses his face into Steve’s shoulder and jack rabbits his hips against his ass, his thighs burning with the effort of maintaining the fast, rapid pace. He knows neither of them are going to hold on much longer, though, and he refuses to let up, remembering his desire to fuck Steve so hard he’d be walking funny for a week, and everyone would know who he belonged to. 

“Fuck, Steve, you take me so good. Love you, love you so much,” he gasps against his shoulder, covering the skin in gentle kisses even as he fucks him hard and deep. He hooks his hands under Steve’s knees and shoves them up to press against his chest, looking down between them so he can watch his cock, ruddy red and shiny with lube, disappear into Steve’s body again and again. It's an intoxicating sight, and he can understand, now, why Steve enjoys taking Bucky in positions that afford him this kind of view. 

He takes advantage of the new angle to piston his hips harder against Steve’s ass, and when he’s rewarded by a sobbing, pleading moan he knows he’s found his prostate.

Bucky crushes their mouths together in one last desperate, messy kiss as he slows his pace enough to put all his strength into a couple hard, deep thrusts, pegging the gland with every single one. Steve comes with a ragged shout of pleasure and Bucky swears he almost blacks out when Steve spasms beneath him, his body clenching tight and quivering around Bucky’s cock. It only takes one more jerky thrust before he’s coming, too, spilling hot and sticky inside of Steve. 

He milks his orgasm with a few shallow rocks of his hips before finally pulling out, letting Steve’s legs sink back down onto the bedspread and crawling up the length of his body so he can collapse on top of his chest, feeling like he’d just run laps around the entire country. 

His thighs and abs ache, and Bucky lets the muscles go limp as he relaxes on top of the other man, panting softly against the crook of his neck.

“Do you.. feel properly chastised?” he asks in a breathless voice, grinning when Steve huffs out a laugh at the terrible joke. 

“Yeah, Buck. Quite thoroughly chastised,” comes the teasing response, and Bucky leans up into the hand that starts to pet idly through his hair, snickering quietly into the arch of his neck.

They lay there like that for a while, tangled together so close that Bucky isn’t quite sure where he ends and Steve begins, before he remembers what Steve had said earlier, heartbeat quickening in his chest.

“Was it true, what you said? That you used to do this to yourself in my bed, wishing it was me?” he whispers, and the fingers in his hair go still for a moment as Steve contemplates his answer. 

“Yeah, Buck. It’s true. And.. After you shipped out, before I was sent to Boot Camp, I spent every night in your bed, hoping that maybe if I did that, if I tempted fate, you’d come striding through the front door, again,” he sighs against Bucky’s forehead, and the emotion welling up in Bucky’s chest is so big it pushes painfully against his ribcage. 

He and Steve didn’t talk very much about the unresolved feelings between them in those years before the war. They had come to some sort of silent agreement that it's a pain better left alone, but, now Bucky just feels the ache of things that could have been. What would it have been like, if he’d decided to spend his last night in America in bed with Steve, instead of taking him out to the Stark Expo with those girls? Would things have been different? Would Steve still be the Steve he was now?

He leans up enough so he can see Steve’s face, studying the freckles that dot his skin and the flop of sweat damp blond hair curling over his forehead. 

Bucky decides that, as much as he wishes they could have had all those years together, he wouldn’t trade the long lifetime they now get to have together for anything in the world. Not even for a chance at changing the past.

He leans down to kiss away the furrow of uncertainty between Steve’s brow, trailing little kisses along the curve of his nose before he captures his mouth, sliding his fingers up to tangle in dirty blond hair. 

There is no point in dwelling on what could have been, or in letting himself be consumed by jealousy over something as trivial as a stranger flirting with Steve, because at the end of the day, Steve is in his bed, now, and no one else’s. 

It might not be what is fair, having to hide the truth of their relationship from the world, or what either of them really wish for.

But it is better than Bucky ever dared to hope he might get to have, and far more than he’d ever thought he could deserve. 

And there was something about Steve Rogers that makes it easy for Bucky to be content with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still taking suggestions/ideas for anything you're interested in seeing, either from Bucky's time at Stark Tower or the months between his escape from Hydra and his arrival in Steve's living room. Leave them in the comments below!


	10. Trying To Swim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But you're sinking like a stone, alone, and I can feel fire in the night waiting here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So wow, ten chapters. When I started writing this fic I never even thought I'd have enough to write about to end up with ten chapters.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has left kind words of encouragement for me on this fic. It really kept me going, and pushed me to work hard on this story. It's been wonderful taking this journey with you!
> 
> Song title and summary from ["Sooner Or Later"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2alcO-Bqylc) by Matt Kearney.
> 
> This chapter takes place before this story began, during the time when Bucky is on his own. Probably about one or two months after the fall of Shield. I felt that part needed more fleshing out, to give you a better feel for the real thought process that drove Bucky to Steve's doorstep, beneath the excuse of using Steve as protection from Hydra.
> 
> The part at the very end takes place the morning after chapter nine.

Today was the last day of the Smithsonian’s Captain America exhibit, and the Soldier felt like he was losing a part of himself.

It was the only thing that seemed to make sense to him, anymore. He would come whenever he could, sneaking in through the roof access door, and spend hours looking at the faces on the walls, and try to remember. He had the video presentation, and every single line of every display label memorized. The Soldier would move his lips to the words, and stare vacantly at the face of Bucky Barnes, so similar to his own, reflected in the fingerprint smudged glass encasing it. 

He had been created to be Hydra’s weapon, but now, without Hydra, he had nothing. He _was_ nothing. Just a gun without anyone to aim it, lost and trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, now.

The Soldier could find some small peace in the hours he spent at the museum, at least. He stared at the face of Steven Rogers, skinny and so small and fragile looking, watching as it transformed into the strong, sturdy form of Captain America. 

He knew him.

He was the reason why the Soldier had disobeyed his handlers, and deserted Hydra. 

And he was looking for the Soldier, now. Him and the man known as Sam Wilson. They had never come close enough to catching the Soldier. He was too good for that, even when the Black Widow was feeding them rumors and whispers she picked up from her contacts. 

They were following a lead a few states over, at the moment. A newspaper headline about a strange, nameless drifter, with a metal arm, who had beaten up a man trying to force a teenage girl into his car against her will and left him, barely half alive, tied to the hood of his car without any clothing. 

The paper reported that he had had quietly waited with the girl until her parents came to pick her up, only to disappear like a ghost the moment they turned around to thank him. 

The Soldier hadn’t intended to make any noise in that town. He’d been hoping to lie low and spend a few nights, there, before Rogers and Wilson arrived, hot on his tail as they always were. But when he’d heard her crying, it had woken some bizarre, protective instinct in him that he didn’t quite understand. He had been across the parking lot and wrenched the door off the man’s car before he’d even realized what he had done. 

It had been a very long time since the Soldier actually helped someone. 

It felt oddly… nice. She had thrown her arms around him and cried into his neck after he beat up her attacker, and he had let her. He hadn’t been touched like that in a long time. Gently. Willingly. With no anger or intent to harm. 

He had been very careful when he returned the contact, keeping the metal monstrosity of his left arm at his side while allowing the flesh hand to carefully rub up and down her back, in what he vaguely remembered to be a soothing gesture.

She’d held his prosthetic hand until her parents arrived, having called them using the Soldier’s cell phone once she calmed down enough to speak. She seemed unfazed by the touch of the cold, unfeeling metal, and he still didn’t quite understand how that was possible, when he himself couldn’t bear the sight of it.

The Soldier looked down at his hand and flexed it experimentally, watching the silver plates ripple faintly. He could still remember the faint pressure of her touch, and wished she’d held the other hand so he could have felt how warm and soft it was. He hadn’t held anyone’s hand in many long years. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” a gentle voice cuts into his reverie, and he jams his hand back into his pocket like he’d been stung, jerking away from the woman that had come up beside him. She had dark brown eyes and long, straight blond hair, a patient smile on her face signaling that she expected his surprise.

“The Museum is closing in a few minutes, if you wouldn’t mind making your way towards the exit.”

The Soldier swallowed thickly and nodded, waiting until she walked away to take one last look at the image of Steve Rogers, and the man who wore the Soldier’s face, laughing side by side on the screen in front of him. He hated the feeling of peace that washed over him whenever he saw that man.

He hated even more that he couldn’t remember if he was Bucky Barnes, or just a pale shadow of him. 

The Soldier stormed from the building without looking back, shivering as the cool night air hit him. It’d been a cold autumn, so far, and promised an even colder winter. It was making it difficult to find suitable shelter, and the Soldier hated the chill. It reminded him of dark, cramped spaces, and the hopeless creep of ice through his veins.

His feet take him down the street of their own accord, and he wonders if it was finally time to move on. He had bounced around from city to city in the weeks that had passed since Hydra’s failure, but he always ended up back in DC, drawn by the offer of home and self that the Smithsonian exhibit offered. But now that it was gone, having only remained as long as it had because of Captain America’s heroism against the Hydra invasion, there was nothing tethering him here.

He thinks of New York, and the run down, crumbling apartment he had visited only two weeks after being free of Hydra. 

The Soldier hadn’t quite understood what brought him to the broken, empty place. It was instinct that had taken him through the back alleys of Brooklyn. Muscle memory, of some sort. His body went where it wanted, and the Soldier followed, obligingly. 

Until he entered the building through the crumbling doorway, nothing about it had seemed terribly out of the ordinary. It was just an old, gutted apartment complex that had long since past its prime.

But when he took that first step inside, it was like he had been punched in the gut with an iron fist, his body doubling over with his arms folded over his stomach. He vomited up the sickly sugar-sweet soda he had stolen from a vending machine, watching the dark fluid sink into the dirt while he tried to catch his breath. It wasn’t abnormal, then, for him to throw up after eating. His body wasn’t used to digesting most solid foods, after seventy years of fluids and tasteless protein pastes, and it was struggling to adapt to the things he had been forced to eat to survive. 

But this wasn’t one of those times. 

The Soldier had thrown up from the sudden shock of pain in his mind, as he was assaulted by pictures and sounds he didn’t recognize. He saw that same man, the man on the bridge, the man he had pulled from the river. 

His mission.

His… friend?

“This was where we lived,” he whispered, and looked around at the crumbling ruin with new eyes. He could see the tiny, rickety beds stuffed in the corner, and the cardboard box where they shucked off their filthy, worn out shoes. The tiny desk by the window where Steve would draw, and write.

He spent the night in that shell of a home, curled up where his bed used to be, heavy leather coat hugged tight around himself like it could somehow protect him from the world. He’d woken the next morning to the sound of footsteps, and the voices of two men, arguing, and the name, ‘Bucky’, spoken like a prayer. 

He was gone before Steve and Sam entered the run down building.

He returned to DC, desperately seeking answers from the silent, smiling face of Captain America on the wall of the Smithsonian. 

The Soldier stalls when his feet suddenly hit grass, instead of concrete and pavement, and looks up to realize they’ve carried him a lot further than he had expected, and in the opposite direction from where he had been staying the past few nights, beneath a small bridge in a park. It looked like a suburban development, and he follows where his feet want to take him, one step at a time, through the quiet streets. 

He recognizes where he is when he takes a left onto a familiar sounding street, heart in his throat as he approaches the dark, silent house. This was where Sam Wilson lived. Where Steve had been staying, whenever they returned to DC, frustrated at another fruitless venture. 

He hesitates, looking around at the houses on either side. The fencing is high enough to keep anyone from being too nosy, and the two men were several hours drive away, as far as he was still aware.

It wasn’t the first time he had visited the home. He had tailed the pair of them to this location more than once, just to study them, and try to understand who and what they were. They never did more than eat and sleep at this house, and study paperwork that was, no doubt, about the Winter Soldier. Sam Wilson was not on Hydra’s radar, either, and they would have no cause, or ability, to come looking for anyone here.

It would be a safe place to stay, for now. 

He’s careful to check for any sort of alarm system before picking the lock on the front door, slipping inside and locking it behind him. The first thing he does is make a beeline for the kitchen, and after a few minutes of searching he comes across a can of tomato soup. The Soldier was starting to digest solid foods more easily, but it was probably better not to push his luck, and, the chances of a soup can, in a cupboard full of soup cans, being missed was fairly low. 

The Soldier didn’t want Steve Rogers to know he had been here, if he could help it. It felt too much like trying to make contact, to allow him to realize the Soldier had come to his doorstep. He wasn’t ready for that.

Not yet. 

He still needed time to catalog the memories that felt so unfamiliar and frightening, and to understand the odd things he experienced when he looked at Steve. 

The feeling of belonging and home that came with every word he said to the Soldier. 

He shivered as he opened the can and tipped it against his mouth, drinking the cold soup without a second thought. He didn’t really know much about how a microwave or an oven worked, and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him as he sat down at the table, feeling unsteady on his feet.

“You can build a bomb and take apart the most complex weaponry and reassemble it in a few short minutes, but you can’t make a bowl of soup,” he tells himself out loud, still unused to the tired, scratchy sound of his own voice. It felt good to say the words in English, though, and whenever he spoke these days, it was always in English. It was natural to him, in a way that Russian never had been. Russian was one of the many languages that the Soldier could speak and understand, but, English was _his_ language.

He couldn’t really explain what made him so sure of that.

It was another one of those strange, unidentifiable beliefs that left the Soldier with more questions than answers.

He finishes the soup and leaves the can on the table to take with him when he left the next morning, standing up and stepping quietly into the other room. It looked like a living area, with a couch and a television and a coffee table, neatly arranged and spotless, as if they hadn’t been used in a while. There was a neatly folded blanket at the end of the couch, and a pillow. The Soldier wonders if this was where Steve slept.

He approaches the couch with no small amount of trepidation and carefully sits down on the plush cushioned seat, hesitating before letting himself lean back against it. It was comfortable. A lot more comfortable than the rocks and dirt and concrete he had been sleeping on in these past few weeks, and infinitely better than the cryo freeze chamber. 

The Soldier wasn’t used to sleeping this much. He would often go days at a time without rest when he was on a mission, because he had no other choice. But now it was as if his body was aware that he was allowed to sleep, and had begun to vocalize its demands for rest much more frequently than before.

Or perhaps it was the after effects of the extended bouts in cryo, and the machine that had been used to wipe him using electricity, finally wearing off. 

Whatever it was, the Soldier wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. As inconvenient and dangerous as sleeping was when you were on the run, he couldn’t deny that the frequent resting left him feeling more alive with every passing day. 

More like a person, and less like a machine.

Even if that rest was often disturbed by dark shadows creeping into his mind, and the piggish face of a man wearing glasses, smirking and telling him that he was to be his masterpiece.

The Soldier kicked his shoes off, more out of fear that he might leave any dirt on the off-white surface of the sofa than any actual desire to make himself more comfortable, and slowly tips himself over onto his side, settling his head on the pillow with such trepidation, one might think it were made of fire.

It smelled faintly of cinnamon and soap, and something else that the Soldier can’t quite identify.

With a painful jolt in his chest, he realizes that it smells like Steve. 

He carefully turns his head to bury his face in the soft cushion and inhales deeply, letting the piney scent of cologne and shampoo wash over him. He had gotten up close and personal with Steve in their brief, but brutal, fights to have picked up his smell. Back then it had just been another detail catalogued away in his mind, but now it was _something._

The Soldier pulls the blanket out from under the pillow and wraps himself up in the soft, scratchy cotton, tugging it up so it completely envelops him and the pillow. The blanket smells of Steve, too, and he takes some small measure of guilty enjoyment from the calming effect this has on him. 

There’s a part of him that knows this is foolish and ridiculous. He didn’t need Steve, or his protection, or the expectations that would come with it. Steve would want him to be Bucky Barnes again, and the Soldier wasn’t ready for that.

But he still can’t muster up enough annoyance with himself to remove his face from the pillow, or throw the blanket off, so, he stays there until he falls asleep, wrapped up in the smell of Steve Rogers in a home that could also be _his_ home, if only he had the nerve to ask for it. 

There are no nightmares that night, and he wakes well after the sun has already risen in the sky to the discomforting feeling of hunger.

It seemed the more the Soldier ate, the more his body demanded to be fed, and that was yet another inconvenience of having to look after himself. He didn’t have the money to properly buy his own food, unwilling to make attempts at pickpocketing that could end with his face on the nine o’clock news, and there was only so much one could find to eat in the garbage of DC, even with soup kitchens to help along the way.

He drinks another can of soup, this time opting to try the chicken and rice, and sets it beside the other empty can, irritated to discover that he had kept the blanket hugged around himself this entire time. 

The Soldier lets it drop and stares at it on the floor for several long, disquieted seconds, before he picks it back up again and folds it over the back of a chair, making sure it didn’t stray near the dirty soup cans nearby. 

He tells himself he should probably leave, soon, before the risk of Steve and Sam coming back grew too great. 

He reminds himself, as he leaves his dirty clothing in a pile on the bathroom floor and turns the water on to near boiling, that weapons didn’t need all these luxuries.

The Soldier ignores the lecturing voice, which always sounds painfully like Alexander Pierce’s, and steps beneath the hot spray of water, shuddering as the heat rolls over his body. It felt delicious, especially against sore, bruised muscles, and the perpetually aching joint where his metal arm met flesh. 

His face pinches in disgust at the darkness of the water washing down his skin, and knows he’s gone far too long without a proper wash. He was sure he looked as disgusting as he felt, but, he had a tendency to avoid his reflection whenever possible. It always felt like a stranger was looking back at him through the glass, judging him for the blood on his hands and the way he kept running from the one person that actually wanted him.

The Soldier tipped his head back to let the spray hit him in the face, eyes clenched shut at the scorching heat on his skin. It was as far as he could get from the memories of ice crystals spreading through his veins, and he cherished it.

He scrubs his hair with the shampoo that had the same smell as the pillow, washing his body over and over until the water ran clear. When he finally feels somewhat clean again, and the water began to grow cold, he turns it off and steps out onto the plush rug, watching the way his toes sank into the fibers. Another odd luxury that the Soldier did not understand, though he liked the way it felt beneath his feet. 

The idea of putting on his filthy clothing after scrubbing so clean seems abhorrent to him, and he stalks his way, naked, down the chilly hallway to a bedroom that must belong to Sam Wilson, taking in the tidy arrangement of furniture, and the pictures and posters that dotted the walls and decorated the top of the bureau. 

He steals a pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt from the bottom of the bottom drawer, hoping they wouldn’t be missed if they were relegated to such a remote location. A clean pair of socks and boxers comes from the back of the top drawer, and, reluctantly, he allows himself to open the closet and take one of the thicker zip up hoodies from inside, knowing that he needed a decent jacket more than he needed to fly below the radar. The small logo on the left breast reads ‘Department of Veterans Affairs’, and he studies it briefly, before he pulls it on. 

These clothes smell of Sam Wilson, not Steve, but the Soldier can’t really say he’s bothered by the change. The dark skinned man was looking for him just as hard as Steve was, even if he didn’t have any personal connection to Bucky Barnes. His scent was not dislikeable to the Soldier.

He returns to the bathroom long enough to bundle his filthy clothing up and add it to the growing pile of trash on the kitchen table, picking up the blanket once more and going back into the living room area. 

He should go, now, truly. He’s lingered here long enough, and with every hour he wasted on trivial luxuries the risk of the home’s real occupants returning grew ever higher. 

But the couch is very soft, and the sunlight streaming in through the sliding glass door is shining warm across the cushions and oh so inviting to the tired soldier.

He lets himself be pulled back down to bury his face in the pillow and closes his eyes, promising the empty room that it would only be a short nap, and then he would leave. 

He wakes to the sudden, jarring sound of a door slamming shut and jerks off the couch so quickly he almost hits the coffee table, jamming his feet into his boots and yanking at the laces enough that they’ll stay on until he gets to safety.

It had been stupid, so, so stupid to let himself fall asleep, and the sight of the reddish, darkening sky outside makes him aware that he had been out for most of the day, which now edged towards night. 

Careless, lazy mistakes. 

He can hear the precise moment when the two men notice the soup cans and old, ratty clothing the Soldier had left on the table, and there’s the faint metallic sound of a gun being cocked. 

They know he’s here, or at least, that he’d been here, and he freezes when his hand brushes against the soft, cotton fabric of the blanket, still pooled around his ankles like a snake trying to keep him rooted to that spot.

He’s bundling it under his arms before he has a second to contemplate it and crosses the room in two steps, unlocking the glass door and slipping through it just as Steve enters the room. When he mounts the fence, he freezes, and chances one look back at the house he had invaded. Steve is standing in the doorway, arm out to block the man with the gun, Sam Wilson, who was behind him. The Soldier meets his gaze for one brief, terrifying instant, and then he’s gone, sprinting through back yards and over fences like his life depended on it.

He doesn’t slow down until he’s back in the city proper, and he feels the sweat beading and slipping down his spine, the once clean t-shirt now sticky and clinging to his skin.

Muttering curses beneath his breath with every step, the Soldier clutches the stolen blanket to his chest as he follows the streets back towards the park he had been sleeping in two nights before, his heart hammering against his ribs at how close he had come to being caught. 

They knew it was him. They knew he had broken in, and eaten their food, and stolen Sam’s clothes. Would they be angry with him? Would they seek to punish him, or demand repayment for the things he had taken?

He stops and focuses on remembering Steve’s face, his stomach lurching at the picture that slowly forms in his mind.

His expression hadn’t been angry, or sad, or even unhappy. If anything, Steve had seemed… _glad_ to see him, though he had to know the Soldier had no intention of sticking around now that they were here. 

The urge to vomit is rising in his throat, but, the Soldier chokes it back, forcing his body to move forward once more. He doesn’t know when he will get his next meal, and he can’t afford to lose the precious calories. 

When he finally returns to the park he had been calling home for the last week, he finds another homeless man has taken the spot beneath the bridge he had been using to sleep. 

Feeling too drained to fight for his privacy, and unwilling to look for another spot, he begrudgingly settles down on the opposite end of the bridge and wraps his stolen blanket around himself. The instant the scratchy cotton is over his face, all pretense of irritation at the stranger who had invaded his bridge fades away, and the rocks digging into his back feel no bigger than pebbles. The smell of Steve fills his senses again, and the Soldier closes his eyes, wondering, just for a brief moment, if this was what it felt like to have something to call home.

When he opens his eyes, he’s staring up at a plain white ceiling, though the smell and warmth of Steve is still wrapped up around him. Bucky looks sideways and smiles at the sight of him, face pressed into Bucky’s shoulder and one arm flopped across his chest, dead to the world. He stirs when Bucky shifts to roll over into his side facing him, tugging Steve’s arms so they wrap fully around him. 

He can see Steve struggling to wake up and chuckles when one sleepy eye peeks open at him, circling his own arms around the blond’s shoulders to pull his head against Bucky’s chest.

“N’thin’ wrong, Buck?” Steve slurs drowsily, and Bucky shakes his head quietly, pressing his lips against the lines creasing Steve’s forehead.

“It’s nothing, Steve, just a happy memory,” he whispered, trailing his fingers through the other man’s hair, “Go back to sleep.”

Steve doesn’t need much persuading and willingly surrenders to the soothing massage against his scalp, and Bucky feels his forehead smooth out beneath his lips. 

He smiles faintly and lets his own eyes fall shut, letting the lingering contentment of the fond memory wash over him. 

“It was the first time I truly felt that, maybe, just maybe, I had a chance at finding a place to call home,” he tells the sleeping man wrapped around his chest, breathing in the familiar, comforting smell of him. 

He’d only had the blanket for a month before he had been forced to leave it behind when a Hydra squad raided the building he’d been squatting in for a few days. It’d been like losing a part of himself, and it had been what pushed him to finally leave DC behind and head to New York, making sure to leave false leads along the way for Sam and Steve to track. 

Bucky huffed out a sigh and reached down to pull the blankets up around Steve’s shoulders, settling his arm across his neck once more. Steve’s only response was to nuzzle his face deeper against Bucky’s chest, arms tightening their embrace around his middle. 

He smiled and pressed another gentle kiss to his temple, letting his lips linger against the soft skin there.

There was something about Steve Rogers that had always felt like home to Bucky, even when he didn’t know it yet. 

“Sleep well, you oaf,” he murmured fondly against Steve’s temple, grinning when he feels Steve shifting in his arms.

“You too, jerk.”

Bucky may have taken a lot of wrong turns down dark roads and gotten lost more than once or twice along the way, but, all the mattered was that he had finally found his way home.

Wherever Steve was, that was where Bucky belonged. It had just taken him a little while to remember that. 

“I love you, Stevie.”

The words came easily, and Bucky smiled as he said them, enjoying the wash of contentment that settled over him at just getting to speak them out loud. 

Steve pulls back enough to look up at Bucky, and he notes, with fondness, the rumpled mess of his hair, and the lines creasing his face from pressing it into Bucky’s shirt. He lets himself be pulled in for a kiss, as gentle and unhurried as the fingers that were carding through his dark hair.

“Love you too, Buck.”

When he finally sinks into a dreamless sleep, those words are still echoing in his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you confused by this suddenly becoming the ending, it's because I decided after rereading the story that it really was, in fact, an ending. And so I decided to make it as such.


End file.
